The House voted to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act on Wednesday with what passes for a seriously bipartisan majority these days: The bill garnered 29 Republican votes. The last time the law was reauthorized, in 2013—not a year that was a pinnacle of bipartisanship, either—it got 87 Republican votes in the House and 23 in the Senate.
But go ahead and tell us about how Democrats should make massive compromises to get Republican votes.
This time around, the Republican sticking points were a provision to take guns away from abusive boyfriends and stalkers and provisions to protect Native American, immigrant, and transgender women.
“Certainly we ran into hiccups with some of the gun issues, and that’s a big one for a number of us, stripping away people’s constitutional rights is not something that we should be doing,” said Sen. Joni Ernst of the House bill’s closure of the boyfriend loophole, a plan to change the fact that right now, a legal spouse convicted of domestic violence loses the right to own a firearm, but a dating partner or stalker with a similar conviction can keep his guns.
High levels of gun ownership are bad news for women, with officials warning last year as gun sales rose at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic: “A recent surge in gun sales has increased already rising concerns among those of us working to protect people from domestic violence and sexual assault due to the already tense situations that may become more dangerous with a (new) firearm in the house.”
That’s bad news because abusers frequently use guns both to kill and to terrorize their partners. According to data from Everytown, “Every month, an average of 53 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner. Nearly 1 million women alive today have reported being shot or shot at by intimate partners, and 4.5 million women have reported being threatened with a gun by an intimate partner.”
And while Republicans object separately to the closure of the boyfriend gun loophole and the added protections for Native, LGBTQ, and immigrant women, “Black, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Hispanic women are victims of homicide at the highest rates, and over 55 percent of these killings are committed by an intimate partner,” according to Everytown, and LGBTQ women are also particularly likely to face intimate partner violence.
With Republicans predictably saying that they support passing some Violence Against Women Act, just not this one, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that Republicans want to protect women unless they “happen to be Native American or an LGBTQ woman or an immigrant women.” That’s probably being generous to Republicans on the subject of protecting women—for one thing, they also don’t want to protect women from gun-owning men they didn’t marry—but it certainly spells out some of the groups Republicans want to leave open to violence.
President Joe Biden was the author of the original Violence Against Women Act in 1994, and considers it one of his major lifetime achievements.