Kirsten Gillibrand Won’t Take No For An Answer

Edward Markey had been a U.S. Senator for all of two hours when Kirsten Gillibrand buttonholed him in the basement of the Capitol one afternoon last summer. Moving with characteristic speed, she pressed him to join her push to take cases of sexual assault out of the military chain of command and give them to independent lawyers to investigate instead. There were 26,000 cases of unwanted sexual contact in the military last year, she argued, out of which only 3,000 were reported and just 302 prosecuted. Too many victims, she added, are afraid to speak out because their commanding officers were either complicit or in denial about the problem. Within hours, Markey was on board.

After months of such conversations on the Senate floor, in quiet corridors and in a daring, onetime raid on the Republican cloakroom, Gillibrand is on the verge of beating the Pentagon (and the quiet opposition of the Obama White House) on a measure that she says will curb the epidemic of sexual assaults in the military. “I was hoping [the issue] would snowball,” Gillibrand says, “because when you’re talking about the lives of men and women, who are so selfless and so sacrificing, to have their lives destroyed not by some enemy abroad but by someone in their own ranks, it creates a very grave injustice.”

And speaking of snowballs, Gillibrand has become something of a force in short order too, chiefly by taking on and then reviving what seem like lost causes. Since filling Hillary Clinton’s seat in 2009, she’s led the fight to repeal “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” pushed through a long-stalled compensation fund for 9/11 first responders and helped pass a law that makes it illegal to profit from insider tips from congressional staff. Her agenda gives little comfort to leaders in either party, and already there is talk of higher office. “If you’re going to represent your people and be a good legislator, you can’t follow the party line,” says Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, one of nine Republicans who have signed on to Gillibrand’s sexual-assault-in-the-military bill. “She’s passionate, and that’s not a word I use a lot.”

Unusual Coalition

As hopeless crusades go, few seem as unlikely as the one Gillibrand is waging on the military’s dubious policy of handling sexual-assault cases inside the established chain of command. She embraced the cause of military-justice reform when she became chair of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, even though veterans Barbara Mikulski of Maryland and Barbara Boxer of California warned her not to get her hopes up.

After a string of high-profile cases that seemed to favor perpetrators over victims, Gillibrand wants to force the Pentagon to take investigations of most sexual-assault charges out of the hands of Navy captains, Air Force colonels and Army commanders and give them instead to lawyers in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. The brass argues that such a move would be prohibitively expensive and would assign attorneys to cases that are often thousands of miles away, and that breaking the chain of command gives troops two masters to serve.

As a compromise, the Pentagon in August pushed through a series of internal reforms hoping to show that it was taking the matter seriously. Now, in an early sign of Gillibrand’s effectiveness, every victim is automatically assigned an advocate who is responsible for making sure the victim’s commanding officers take action. The White House–backed move was designed to undercut Gillibrand’s campaign, but it didn’t stop it. Gillibrand now has 53 solid yes votes for her deeper reforms and, she claims, a few others to push her close to the 60-vote threshold she will need to overcome a filibuster.

The fight over how to handle such cases, which will come to a head in the coming months, has already led to an unprecedented display of female power on the Senate floor, with Gillibrand going toe to toe with Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill, who has taken the Pentagon line. If Gillibrand holds a trump card in the showdown, it is that some conservative Republicans have joined her team, perhaps seeing the chance to hand the Obama White House a defeat. Among them: Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas. (Meanwhile, Gillibrand says she has 182 House members on board and is working on reaching the 218-vote threshold for passage in the lower chamber.) “If we can’t pass it as an amendment,” Gillibrand says, “then we’ll push for a stand-alone act in both chambers.”

Born to the Game

If Gillibrand takes unusual risks with party elites, it’s because she is so familiar with them. She was born in Albany, N.Y., in 1966, to lawyer parents. Her maternal grandmother was Dorothea “Polly” Noonan, founder of the Albany Democratic Women’s Club and right hand to Mayor Erastus Corning II, who ruled Albany for more than 40 years. Her father, meanwhile, was a Democratic lobbyist close to two powerful Republicans: George Pataki and Alfonse D’Amato, for whom Gillibrand spent a summer interning. After graduating with an Asian-studies major from Dartmouth (Gillibrand speaks Mandarin), she went to law school at UCLA, clerked for a Reagan-appointed federal judge and then spent 14 years at tony Manhattan law firms where she helped defend tobacco company Philip Morris from criminal and civil racketeering charges. In 1999 she began volunteering on Clinton’s Senate campaign; by 2006 she’d been elected to Congress from her childhood Albany district.

Gillibrand (pronounced with a soft g) was a dogged House member, helping ban junk food from school lunches in 2007 while making public her daily schedule in a show of transparency. But when New York Governor David Patterson named her to fill Clinton’s Senate seat in January 2009, gun-control advocates and immigration groups rebelled. Hailing from a rural district, Gillibrand had bragged of having two rifles and an A rating from the National Rifle Association. She also opposed giving undocumented workers amnesty.

And so in the months before the November 2010 special election to serve out the remainder of Clinton’s term, Gillibrand’s positions evolved. Quickly. She became a supporter of the Dream Act, which grants citizenship to undocumented children who’ve grown up in the U.S. And she moved left on gun control; an NRA spokesman said it was the quickest flip from “an A to an F rating I’ve ever witnessed.” Her staff says the change was inevitable given that she had gone from representing a small, rural, mostly white district to a hugely multicultural state plagued in many urban areas by gun violence. Still, those reversals were done at such high speeds that Chuck Schumer, the senior Senator from New York, reportedly told her to take it down a notch. Schumer now says he only encouraged her “to fight back against attacks when at first she was hesitant,” he tells TIME.

Once in the Senate, Gillibrand showed similar nerve. She helped force through the repeal of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” which hadn’t seen action on the Senate floor in nearly 20 years, overcoming a filibuster by such GOP stalwarts as John McCain. The 9/11 Health and Compensation Act had been languishing in the Senate for a decade when she began marching victims through Senators’ offices, pleading for relief. The STOCK Act, which barred congressional staff from giving investors and “researchers” insider tips about the direction various bills might be going, went against her donor base on Wall Street. None of these measures would have stood much chance of passage in the past 10 years, but Gillibrand found ways to pick the lock on each, often despite the opposition of Democratic leaders. “Can you do this stuff without pissing [the leadership] off so much so they basically see you as nothing but a gadfly?” asks Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “Or can you do it in a way that, even though it creates headaches, they understand you’re doing it for appropriate reasons? My sense is Gillibrand’s in the latter group.”

She has an understudy’s gift for role models: she is effusive about her predecessor Clinton, while Schumer has shown her how Empire State Senators will always have a ready supply of cash–if they know how to deploy it. Since 2009, Gillibrand has raised more than $31 million, mostly from donors on Wall Street, much of which she’s given away to colleagues and political committees. That’s a huge amount for a Senator who has yet to serve a full term, and Gillibrand has found that the money helps buy goodwill and willing ears when she has a pet issue. It also makes her popular with new candidates and those facing re-election.

In Fighting Trim

Gillibrand, who turns 47 on Dec. 9, has two children under 11 and is a Senate anomaly in other ways as well. She once chased Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican, into the GOP cloakroom trying to win his vote. (Gillibrand came up short, but the gambit raised eyebrows.) Such efforts help explain why even her rivals give her points for energy and may be a reason Gillibrand has lost 40 lb. while serving in the slow-moving upper chamber. (A high-jog, low-carb regimen, carefully documented in Self magazine, did the rest, she says.)

For a pol who began life in Washington as a moderate, she is now something of a confirmed New York liberal–maybe not the best platform for higher office, but hardly the worst either. Even among her colleagues, there is a quiet recognition that Gillibrand has her eye on bigger things. Sitting with 18 of her female Senate colleagues for an interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer in January about the historic number of women in the Senate, Gillibrand was silent when Sawyer asked if anyone in the room might one day run for President.

Mazie Hirono, a Hawaii Democrat sitting next to Gillibrand, made a show of putting an arm around Gillibrand, who lowered her head, eyes down. An understudy, after all, never covets the leading role.