McCaskill's criminal justice experience has fueled her commitment to the issue. | John Shinkle/POLITICO McCaskill's 'lonely' sex-assault stand

Sen. Claire McCaskill is on the verge of a historic victory reforming the Pentagon’s sexual assault policies.

But rather than basking in acclaim during the debate’s climatic week in the Capitol, the Missouri Democrat finds herself paying a political cost for being an outlier within her own caucus. She’s the only one of the Senate’s 16 Democratic women opposing a much more sweeping change that removes the chain of command from prosecuting sexual assault and other major military crimes.


McCaskill’s background as a former prosecutor in Kansas City who locked up sexual predators and counseled domestic violence victims has played a key role in recent weeks as she has lobbied more than two dozen undecided senators that there are legitimate reasons to vote against her fellow Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s sweeping overhaul to the military’s World War II-era justice system.

( See also: POLITICO's Chain of Command series)

Her criminal justice experience also has fueled her commitment to addressing military sexual assault by reforming the current system rather than blowing it up amid a nearly yearlong intra-party fight that has left some bruises. Harsh attacks from sexual assault victims can do that even if the female senators’ disagreement is over an esoteric policy understood by few outside the armed forces.

“There’s moments it feels lonely and personally painful, but I am comforted by the fact what I’m doing is dictated by years of experience in the courtroom, and I’m not sure that any of my other women colleagues have had that experience,” McCaskill told POLITICO.

The Senate’s current cast of 20 women — the largest in history — is a subject of much pride and camaraderie on Capitol Hill. They dine together about once a month and recently hosted a bridal shower for Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine.). Earlier this summer, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) organized a private meeting for the group to discuss their legislative options on military sexual assault, and several senators who hadn’t been directly engaged in the debate got a sense there were sharp divisions among them.

( Also on POLITICO: Brass slow-walk assault orders)

“We’re not monolithic,” McCaskill said.

Several of the female senators interviewed in recent days downplayed the Democratic divide, calling it an honest policy difference that gets glaring press attention only because of the lawmakers’ gender. “There’s two strong women and this happens all the time with guys,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.).

But the lawmakers at the center of the Senate lobbying campaign also have been willing to play the gender card even as the Pentagon’s own estimates show males make up a majority of sexual assault victims. At a press conference last week to unveil additional sexual assault reforms, Republicans Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Deb Fischer of Nebraska were the only senators standing alongside McCaskill.

( Also on POLITICO: Reid backs Gillibrand amendment)

“Sen. McCaskill has a well-earned reputation for being a stalwart advocate for victims of sexual predators. That’s been her history,” Fischer said. “I look to Sen. McCaskill as an expert here in the U.S. Senate.”

McCaskill has also helped draw attention to the divide through a relentless lobbying and PR campaign.

She led the opposition this spring during a markup in the Armed Services Committee when Gillibrand’s proposal was stripped out of the underlying defense authorization bill. She also helped pile more than two dozen other sexual assault policies into the legislation that pushes the Pentagon to pick up its game, including making it a crime to retaliate against a victim who reports an incident and prohibiting commanders from overturning jury convictions.

The media spotlight that Gillibrand commands in New York — recent profiles highlighting her effort have run in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal — also has given McCaskill a powerful platform. The two senators have been following each other just about everywhere from undecided senators’ offices to blue-ribbon panels studying the issue to “PBS NewsHour,” where they appeared one night after the other to make their arguments.

“We’ve done everything besides a televised debate between the two of them,” a McCaskill aide said.

Leading up to the floor fight, which may conclude as early as Wednesday, McCaskill has played an even harder game of hardball. She smiled wide when asked last week whether her amendment with Ayotte and Fischer is designed to give undecided senators who want to vote against Gillibrand another option to at least say they supported something.

“Yeah, but by the way, they’re going to be able to do that just by voting for the underlying bill,” McCaskill said.

McCaskill’s efforts opposing Gillibrand have brought her plenty of heat, too.

The victim advocacy group Protect Our Defenders ran a half-page ad in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch earlier this summer challenging McCaskill’s position, running an open letter from a Navy veteran who was a sexual assault victim and whose support was featured on McCaskill’s 2012 reelection campaign website.

“We cannot speak to her motives. You must ask her,” Nancy Parrish, president of Protect Our Defenders, said of McCaskill. “However, I can say that we do not understand why she would want to leave the legal decisions under the exclusive authority of conflicted and often biased commander of the accused offender rather than simply allow experienced prosecutors to do their jobs. We do not understand her logic.”

Attacks against McCaskill have been even sharper on social media.

“Dear @clairecmc Thanks 4 railroading the Military Justice Improvement Act. Is it true that you have never served a day in your life? #MJIA,” Jennifer Norris, a Maine-based Air Force veteran who works with sexual assault victims at the Military Rape Crisis Center, tweeted, referring to Gillibrand’s legislative proposal by its official name.

Missouri political observers say they’re not surprised to see McCaskill take a different path than all of her Senate Democratic female colleagues. After all, McCaskill cleaned up with women voters in 2012 against Republican Todd Akin — 58 percent to 36 percent, according to a CNN exit poll — after the congressman linked pregnancy to “legitimate rape.”

“She doesn’t give a sh—. She really doesn’t,” said Kenneth Warren, a Saint Louis University political science professor. “She’s so independent, so strong as a woman; she doesn’t seem to suffer from any insecurities. She just feels like on this issue that she’s right. I don’t think she cares that Elizabeth Warren and Barbara Mikulski, that they’re all against her.”

McCaskill also has earned a reputation in Missouri for challenging the military — last year’s defense bill included a change she was seeking to overhaul wartime contracting — and also for cracking down on criminals. “Knowing her reputation and knowing her, she’s a pretty principled woman almost to a fault. She’s got a lot of enemies because of it,” Warren said.

George Connor, a political science professor at Missouri State University, said he doesn’t see an obvious political motive in McCaskill’s position. “On a zillion other issues, you can do some political calculus, and you can say, ‘Missouri has Fort Leonard Wood; we have B-1 bombers; we have Boeing,” he said.

But on this issue, Connor said, “it doesn’t seem to be electorally motivated. It’s not separating her from a challenger. It’s not separating her from being something else. My honest initial response is that Sen. McCaskill’s stand on the issue, and her willingness to stick to her guns, is she believes it’s the right thing to do. I’ve been talking about Missouri politics for 25 years, and I’m not sure I’ve ever said that.”

Gillibrand — who raised more than $215,000 for McCaskill’s last campaign through email solicitations and contributed $5,000 through her leadership political action committee — also downplayed her differences with her Democratic rival.

“I admire Claire so much. I will help her every step of her career in any way I can,” Gillibrand said in an interview. “I truly believe she’s a champion. She’s a champion for victim rights. She’s an amazing senator. She’s an amazing advocate. We just disagree on this point.”

But McCaskill isn’t relenting. She bristles at suggestions she’s too closely linked to the Defense Department, lashing out earlier this year after a POLITICO story described the military’s high success rate getting what it wants out of the Armed Services Committee that McCaskill serves on.

“Anybody who characterizes me as someone who is protecting the Pentagon and somehow I’m in cahoots with the Pentagon, trying to hurt sexual assault victims … with all due respect to you guys, I think you’re terrific, but there is nobody who will be further in front of the line to kick you until you’re senseless if we don’t get this problem under control,” she said.

McCaskill also refuses to pull her punches with Gillibrand, digging at the New Yorker’s idea last week of making a last-minute change to her amendment so that only sexual assault and rape fall outside the chain of command.

“I know that in my book, the right way to go about this is to try to get the policy right and not try to change your policy to try to get votes,” McCaskill said. Gillibrand on Sunday backed away from the idea and said she’d push for her original amendment targeting more than two dozen major military crimes, including sexual assault, theft and murder.

In an interview this spring, McCaskill said she would keep an open mind if she was able to defeat Gillibrand’s amendment but then saw that the Pentagon hadn’t cleaned up its act. She’d be watching over the next two to three years to see that the number of people who say in confidential surveys that they’ve been sexually assaulted closely matches the data in the military’s official criminal investigation reports.

But one thing McCaskill said she won’t do is this: back down just because she’s on the opposite side of a women’s issue.

“This is way too important to me to make a decision based on what is politically correct,” she said. “This is really heartfelt on my part. And it wouldn’t make any difference if the president called me and said, ‘This is the most important thing in the world to me. I want you to change your mind.’ I’d say, ‘You are out of luck. I’m not going to do that.’”