Guns Are More Important Than Women, Apparently

Senate Republicans were more than happy to let the Violence Against Women Act provisions expire in 2019, and Democratic efforts to revive it have been spectacularly unsuccessful as the Senate GOP vowed to block anything that would actually help women from not being shot to death by domestic partners. Here in 2022, Chuck Schumer and the Democrats are going to give Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans a huge win with a gutted VAWA bill with zero provisions for gun safety.

It’s been an embarrassingly bumpy road for VAWA reauthorization in Congress. Once upon a time, this was legislation that passed unanimously in both chambers. How can you not support programs credited with stopping violence against women and saving people’s lives?

But the last time Congress reauthorized VAWA was in 2013, and that was only after an ugly partisan fight over adding new protections for Native American, LGBTQ and immigrant victims of domestic violence. That authorization lapsed in 2018, and, despite the House passing bipartisan bills to renew it, Senate Republicans simply wouldn’t unite on anything.

The result is that VAWA’s authorization has been expired since 2019. That doesn’t mean the law itself expired; it means there’s been uncertainty for its grant programs and no ability to update the law with new protections that domestic violence advocates say are badly needed.

The Senate bill unveiled Wednesday is a different story.

For starters, it has bipartisan co-sponsors: Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa).

It also has other Republican cosponsors right out of the gate. They are Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), Rob Portman (Ohio), John Cornyn (Texas), Kevin Cramer (N.D.), Thom Tillis (N.C.), Jerry Moran (Kansas) and, at the last minute, Richard Burr (N.C.).

That’s 10 GOP co-sponsors. Because of the Senate filibuster, it takes 60 votes to pass any bill, or 10 Republicans voting with all 50 Democrats. That means the newly introduced VAWA bill already has the votes to pass, presuming all Democrats vote for it.

The problem is there's not 50 Democrats available.

VAWA is a priority for President Joe Biden. The 1994 law is one of his signature accomplishments. It was the first major federal legislative package focused on stopping violence against women, and it has since provided billions of dollars in grants for lifesaving programs. Rates of domestic violence declined by more than 50% between 1993 and 2008 after VAWA became law, per the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

“I am grateful that this critical bipartisan bill is moving forward,” Biden said of the VAWA bill in a Wednesday-night statement. “I look forward to Congress delivering it to my desk without delay.”

The Senate bill is similar to the version that passed the House in March 2021, but there is one big difference: The Senate bill doesn’t include a gun safety provision that would have prohibited people who have been convicted of abusing their dating partners from owning firearms, closing the so-called “boyfriend loophole.”

The gun provision was the biggest sticking point in the Senate, where most Republicans simply refused to support a VAWA bill that included any kind of restrictions on gun access. The National Rifle Association, among other gun rights groups, made it clear they opposed the provision.

Even Murkowski and Ernst tried to keep the gun language in the bill, along with Durbin and Feinstein, according to a Senate Democratic aide. But in the end, they didn’t have the GOP votes to pass the bill with the provision in it.

“It was a really difficult decision,” said this aide, who requested anonymity to speak freely about private conversations. “But it came down to we don’t want this to be a messaging bill. We want this to be a bill that can get to Biden’s desk.”

Durbin didn’t give any details on when the bill might start moving through the Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, and then onto the Senate floor.

“We’re perilously close to 60 votes,” he said.

He emphasized that every vote counts for passing VAWA and acknowledged the current absence of Sen. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), who had a stroke recently. Lujan is expected to return in four to six weeks.

 

So yeah, there's no way this bill moves until April at the earliest, and that's an eternity in election year politics.