By a margin of 263-158, the House of Representatives voted to renew and upgrade the 25-year-old Violence Against Women Act Thursday and delivered a defeat to the National Rifle Association in the process. Now, as the bill heads to the Senate, we get to see if there is any hope for renewing the act given the opposition of obstructionist Republicans.
The act has provided more than $7 billion in grants to battered women’s shelters and other programs designed to help women, including stepped-up prosecution of cases of abuse. It was enacted in 1994 and has been renewed three times. In 2012, House Republicans fought hard against adding protections for LGBTQ people, American Indian women, and undocumented immigrants, but the law was reauthorized anyway. Now we’ll see whether the Senate will fight the law overall or just try to remove the reform that the gun lobby opposed. Li Zhou at Vox reports:
In the latest update, sponsored by Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) — the sole Republican co-sponsor — Democrats are seeking to expand several tenets, like providing additional financial aid for women who’ve experienced domestic violence to stay in their homes and ramping up punishment for cyberbullying. But they also included one that’s drawn the ire of the NRA: banning all intimate partners who’ve been charged with abuse and stalking from purchasing a firearm. (Currently this ban only applies to a person if he or she was “married to, lived with, or have a child with the victim,” a Fortune report notes.)
“The gun control lobby and anti-gun politicians are intentionally politicizing the Violence Against Women Act as a smokescreen to push their gun control agenda,” NRA spokesperson Jennifer Baker told NPR as part of an explanation for the organization’s opposition. The NRA has both urged House members to vote against the bill and said it would publish scores regarding lawmakers’ final votes on it.
House Republicans have complained that Democrats allowed the law to expire during the government shutdown so that anti-stalker items could be added. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been pushing for a “clean” bill, a no-additions renewal, arguing inaccurately that in the past only modest changes have been added, apparently misremembering the 2012 battle.
Even though 33 House Republicans ultimately voted for the Democrat-crafted renewal, only one Republican—Fitzpatrick—had chosen to co-sponsor it. Rep. Bass, one of the Democratic co-introducers of the bill, said this could come back to hurt Republicans come 2020:
“I am sure my colleagues in the Republican Party would not want to be on record not supporting the Violence Against Women Act,” she said. “What message does this send to women? . . . What message does this send to Republican women about the welcome that they receive from Republicans? Why would you run for office?”
Why? In all too many cases, to keep bills like this one from getting on the books in the first place and to eviscerate or erase ones that already are.