Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s years-long fight on Capitol Hill to reform the military’s justice system has won enough bipartisan support in the Senate to overcome a filibuster, but the effort is now running into a new obstacle.

Four days in a row last week, the New York Democrat took to the Senate floor, calling for quick passage of her legislation through the chamber.

“We've been debating this issue for eight years,” she said one day. “The current system is not working,” she argued on another day.

But each time she spoke on the floor calling to move her bill, a fellow Democrat — Sen. Jack Reed, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee — objected.

Gillibrand’s bill calls for removing decisions over whether to prosecute certain serious crimes, including rape, manslaughter, child pornography, and murder, from the chain of command. Instead, an independent military prosecutor would be in charge of those decisions.

“You should professionalize your military justice system,” she said. “We need a system that’s worthy of the sacrifice of the men and women who serve.”

Reed, from Rhode Island, says he wants to see the legislation go through regular order, vetted in committee, and indicated he plans to incorporate reforms into the larger annual defense bill. Gillibrand worries going that route could end up watering the reforms down, reducing the scope of her proposal to focus solely on sex crimes.

“The committee will typically or traditionally only do things that DOD is comfortable with,” she said, referring to the Department of Defense.

Gillibrand has worked on this legislation for years, her concern driven in part by reports of sexual assaults in the military. One in 16 active duty women said they had experienced a sexual assault in the prior year, according to a report released by the Pentagon in 2019

“If we keep handing these cases over to the command, they're going to continually cover for their own,” said Tara Cellarius, who once served as a military ombudsman, a role that she said involved helping women navigate the command structure and report alleged crimes.

Gillibrand says her bill has more than 60 supporters in the Senate, more than enough to overcome a Senate filibuster. The coalition stretches the political spectrum, with cosponsors ranging from progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders to conservatives like Sen. Ted Cruz.

A spokesman for Majority Leader Charles Schumer said in a statement that Schumer “supports the bill, has for years and is discussing the best path forward to get it done.”

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