WASHINGTON – The U.S. House on Thursday passed and sent to President Barack Obama a far-reaching extension of the Violence Against Women Act.
The vote came after House Republican leaders, cognizant of divisions in their own ranks and the need to improve their faltering image among women voters, accepted a bill that cleared the Senate two weeks ago on a strong bipartisan vote.
The Republican decision to show the white flag came after the party’s poor showing among women in last November’s election and Democratic success in framing the debate over the Violence Against Women Act as Republican policy hostile to women. President Barack Obama won 55 per cent of the women’s vote last November. Republican presidential candidates haven’t won the women’s vote since 1984, when Ronald Reagan held a 12-point lead over Walter Mondale among women.
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The bill renews a 1994 law that has set the standard for how to protect women, and some men, from domestic abuse and prosecute abusers. Thursday’s 286-138 vote came after House lawmakers rejected a more limited approach offered by Republicans.
It was the third time this year that the leader of the House, Speaker John Boehner, has allowed Democrats and moderates in his own party prevail over the Republicans’ much larger conservative wing. As with a Jan. 1 vote to avoid a budget crisis and legislation to extend aid to victims of a severe storm that hit the Northeast, a majority of House Republicans voted against the final anti-violence bill.
The law has been renewed twice before without controversy, but it lapsed in 2011 as it was caught up in the battles between Democrats and Republicans that now divide Congress.
Last year, the Republican-controlled House refused to go along with a bill that the Democrat-controlled Senate passed that would have made clear that lesbians, gays, immigrants and Native American women should have equal access to Violence Against Women Act programs.
The Senate passed its bill on a 78-22 vote with every Democrat, every woman senator and 23 of 45 Republicans supporting it.
A turning point in the debate came earlier this month, when 19 Republicans, led by Rep. Jon Runyan, wrote a letter to their leadership urging them to accept a bipartisan plan that would reach all victims of domestic violence. The letter, Runyan said, was a catalyst in showing the leadership “a willingness of people in the House to really compromise” and see that the Senate “has a pretty good bill.”
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