Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez knew she was picking a fight when she embarked on a mission to repeal the military’s 53-year-old rape law.
The reality struck the California Democrat last week as she confronted the Pentagon’s brawny and stealthy lobbying arm.
In the hours before a House subcommittee meeting considered her bill, Pentagon lawyers secretly lobbied the Republican leadership against it, saying the Department of Defense needed another year to study the proposal, which would modernize the definition of rape.
The back-room maneuvering was successful. And it dealt a preliminary blow to her bill. But Sanchez, a former rape victim, announced that she would take the issue before the full House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday.
“Our women don’t want to hear that the Department of Defense needs more time to study this,” Sanchez said. “We need change now.”
Sanchez, who sits on the Armed Services Committee, has whipped up a tempest on Capitol Hill as she seeks the most sweeping change ever to the military’s Uniform Code of Military Justice. Her effort has led to flurries of e-mails, emergency Pentagon meetings and eleventh-hour lobbying.
It also has exposed the Defense Department’s powerful spell over congressional processes, as well as top military officials’ aversion to altering their own justice system.
The Pentagon refused repeated requests by The Denver Post to comment about the bill.
The 44-year-old lawmaker’s mission stems in part from a very personal sense of justice.
“I didn’t report my rape years ago,” Sanchez said. “In thinking about it, I was a coward. In retrospect, I would hope that today every woman feels like she can step forward. I can do something about that.”
Sanchez’s assault, which occurred 20 years ago when she was a college student, did not involve a soldier. But back then, many victimized civilian women were reluctant to report. In 1986, Congress expanded the rape code to include acquaintance rape and other coercive influences other than physical force. The law is now used by 37 states.
Sanchez’s bill is closely patterned after that law. It also recognizes intoxicants as a force in coercing sex and acknowledges that supervisors can pressure underlings for sex.
“This is a power tool, instead of a hand tool, for prosecuting these crimes,” Sanchez said.
Critics of the existing military definition say it allows loopholes for rapists, relying too heavily on proving physical force.
In early April, Sanchez felt the climate was perfect for changing the law, given a string of sexual assault scandals in the military exposing leniency for sex offenders, typically involving acquaintance rapes.
But her proposal challenges the usual way of doing business in Washington. Even though Congress created the military’s regulations and oversees them, lawmakers often defer to the Defense Department to take the lead on changes.
That relationship was assailed earlier this year by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, which found “significant and disturbing degree of erosion in the quality and structure of congressional oversight” of the Defense Department.
Sanchez and a Pentagon source said that many military lawyers support changing the statute but are being thwarted by conservative colleagues.
“Essentially, her bill would adopt the majority approach in our country to criminalizing sexual assault,” said a high-level Pentagon source. “The problem is that older lawyers dominate the process at the Pentagon.”
A defining moment in the controversy came in Sanchez’s office May 4 as she challenged two Pentagon lawyers to justify why her proposal shouldn’t go forward.
Robert Reed, associate deputy general counsel, told her the Pentagon needed more time to study it and to update its manuals. Moreover, Reed said he wasn’t convinced that victims would be better protected.
“You’re stonewalling,” she recalled telling Reed. “Obviously, you haven’t been raped before. I myself have.”
A Sanchez aide said her remark left Reed and the other Defense Department lawyer speechless. Reed did not return phone calls seeking comment.
A day after that meeting, Sanchez’s Total Force Subcommittee took up her bill.
Midway through the discussion, chairman John McHugh, a New York Republican, acknowledged that the Pentagon had supplied a letter to him hours earlier outlining concerns, including that the bill did not touch on pornography issues.
Sanchez protested, saying she never had seen the letter. And, she said, the pornography proposal was a “red herring” that had no place in an assault statute.
McHugh apologized for not supplying the letter to Sanchez. He praised her effort but said Defense Department needed the extra time. “It’s not my intention to defer blindly to what those on the other side of the river view as a challenge,” McHugh said, referring to the Pentagon.
Vic Snyder, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, said Sanchez needs to find Republican votes to keep her bill alive.
