The more news-infused among you may know that Senator Al Franken (D-MN) recently proposed an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill that would punish contractors who restrict their employees “from taking workplace sexual assault, battery or discrimination claims to court.” The same people will probably know that 30 senators, all male, voted against the amendment and thus earned themselves the second award of this week.

While I still wanted to write about the sudden respect for General McChrystal’s opinion — the treatment of generals during the Iraq War is an issue near and dear to my heart — I feel this one deserves the award more. If you’re not familiar with the backstory, here’s a super-abridged version: Jamie Leigh Jones was an employee of KBR, a defense contractor and subsidiary of Halliburton (y’know, Dick Cheney’s old homies) whose co-workers drugged and gang-raped her, causing her serious bodily damage.
When she attempted to take the case to court, she found out that not only did Halliburton consider gang rape… wait for it… a “workplace injury,” and that thus her contract required her to undergo mandatory arbitration within the company, but she also discovered that photographs taken of her post-assault injuries had mysteriously disappeared from Halliburton’s storage. It took the combined weight of the State Department and Texas Representative Ted Poe to see to it that her case got to court after all.

Yet Senator Jeff Sessions, the fellow who quite rightly grilled our newest Supreme Court Justice during her confirmation hearings, gets off somewhere in Fantasyland Station saying that an amendment to stop this practice amounts to nothing more than a political attack on Halliburton. Really, Senator? Whatever Franken’s motives, it seems a fairly black-and-white piece of legislation to me — one in which this particular shade of gray is overall superfluous.