Al Franken’s amendment [1] to the new DoD appropriations bill has passed. Obama has signed it into law.
This is the now infamous anti-rape amendment, which opens up and begins to hold accountable contractor abuse in cases involving sexual assault. The vote was 68-30, which is not exactly close. The thirty votes against?
Republicans:
Alexander (R-TN)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Bond (R-MO)
Brownback (R-KS)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burr (R-NC)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Graham (R-SC)
Gregg (R-NH)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johanns (R-NE)
Kyl (R-AZ)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Risch (R-ID)
Roberts (R-KS)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Thune (R-SD)
Vitter (R-LA)
Wicker (R-MS)
Most of these people have not explained themselves, but have carped loudly afterward at their “characterization” as somehow pro-rape. An accusation Franken did not make. (Part of the heat around this has been generated by Franken’s acrimonious row with Senator’s Corker and Alexander, who co-wrote an op-ed piece condemning the amendment.) Senator Cornyn has been quoted in the after math thus:
Trying to tap into the natural sympathy that we have for this victim of this rape —and use that as a justification to frankly misrepresent and embarrass his colleagues, I don’t think it’s a very constructive thing.
Any embarrassment seems, however, to have been self-acquired in this case. Senator Sessions complaint about the amendment curiously misses the point of it while sounding a standard Republican note:
“Congress should not be involved in writing or rewriting private contracts,” he argued. The bill was, he maintained, a “political amendment at bottom, representing a political attack on Halliburton.”
The back-story behind this involves a contract worker, Jamie Leigh Jones [2], who was gang raped by coworkers in Baghdad. Because of a binding arbitration clause in her contract, she and others were not technically allowed to bring this into the open.
Sessions—and perhaps many of his colleagues—see this as a question of the sanctity of contracts trumping all other law and evidently moral argument. Perhaps they’re afraid contractors like KBR won’t work for the government anymore unless such acts can be neatly sweapt under the carpet? Absurd. KBR likely wouldn’t exist without government contracts (ours and others), so it must be something else (possibly relating to campaigns…)
Once more, however, the Republicans are making themselves out to look like fools over an issue which has no (one hopes) sympathy with mainstream voters, but seems creepily consistent with the Religious Right wing of the party, who have difficulty understanding rape as a concept. Strictly speaking (so one can hear the argument go), Jamie Leigh Jones, being a woman, shouldn’t even have been there, working for KBR, with other men not related to her, and therefore what happened to her was perhaps at her (possibly unconscious) invitation. I can hear one of them saying in defense “Well, it’s not like the Muslims—at least they didn’t stone her to death.”
Of course, that is conjecture. I have no evidence that any of them actually think that way…well, not much.
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