Domestic violence law revisited
House approves reviving, updating protections
WASHINGTON – The House on Wednesday voted to update and revive a 26-year-old law aimed at reducing domestic and sexual violence that expired in 2018 after Democrats and Republicans could not agree on changes.
The latest version of the Violence Against Women Act must still be approved by the Senate. It passed the House by a vote of 244-172, and 29 Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues in voting for its passage.
A similar bill the House passed in 2019 was not taken up by the then-republican controlled Senate. Passage was impeded by gun control politics.
“Certainly we ran into hiccups with some of the gun issues, and that’s a big one for a number of us,” said Sen. Joni Ernst, R-iowa, who is working on a GOP alternative in the Senate. “Stripping away people’s constitutional rights is not something that we should be doing.”
The National Rifle Association objected to a provision that would prevent people convicted of abusing dating partners from buying or owning guns. The NRA argued that the change was too broad and would ensnare people for minor offenses such as a tweet.
That provision is still in the legislation, along with other changes intended to strengthen services and expand protections for victims and survivors.
Democrats say domestic violence has risen sharply during the pandemic, increasing the urgency of renewing the law.
“Delay is not an option,” President Joe Biden said in a statement when the bill was reintroduced earlier this month.
Biden has called the original act, passed in 1994 as part of an omnibus crime package, one of his top accomplishments from his lengthy Senate career. Biden was the lead author of the legislation, which uses federal grants to help victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking and to try to reduce those crimes.
He said this month that because he “was raised to believe that the greatest sin was the abuse of power,” he championed the need for a federal law, despite being told that domestic violence was a “family issue” that should be left to families to address in private.
Ernst said she’s hoping to show there’s a significant group of Republicans willing to work with Democrats to come up with a “good, modernized bill” that can block a GOP filibuster.
ERA resolution passes
The other measure the House took up Wednesday would remove the deadline for states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, a decades-long effort to amend the Constitution to expressly prohibit discrimination based on sex. Congress initially required the states to ratify it by 1979, a deadline it later extended to 1982.
The resolution to repeal the ERA’S ratification deadline passed, 222-204.
The Justice Department under President Donald Trump said Congress cannot revive a proposed constitutional amendment after the deadline for its ratification has expired. Supporters would have to start over and follow Article V of the Constitution, which requires support from two-thirds of each chamber of Congress and ratification from three-quarters of the states before an amendment is added to the Constitution.
The fight over the Equal Rights Amendment began almost a century ago. The amendment finally passed with the requisite majority in each chamber when President Richard Nixon was serving his first term.
Shortly after Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the amendment last year, the archivist of the United States declared he would take no action to certify the amendment’s adoption, citing the Justice Department opinion.
Earlier this month, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by three Democratic state attorneys general that had sought to force the federal government to recognize Virginia’s vote.
In a separate statement Wednesday,
Biden pointed out that he supported the ERA when he was a young senator, adding, “Nearly 50 years later, it is long past time that we enshrine the principle of gender equality in our Constitution.”
A White House official said Biden remains committed to the ERA, but he won’t direct the Office of Legal Counsel to rescind its opinion or to reach a particular conclusion out of respect for the Justice Department’s independence. The official said Biden considered the House vote the appropriate next step. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Rep. Tom Mcclintock, R-calif., noted that a champion of the amendment, the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, had said it was time to start anew.
“This measure is brazenly unconstitutional,” Mcclintock said. “If the majority were serious, they would reintroduce the ERA and debate it openly and constitutionally as Ginsburg suggests.”
The ERA faced bitter opposition from some conservatives, who say it could be used as a legal tool to fight state efforts to curb abortion.
“If ratified, the ERA would be used to codify the right to abortion, undoing pro-life protections and forcing taxpayers to fund abortions,” warned Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-ariz.
Supporters argued that the Constitution does not guarantee that all the rights it protects are held equally by all citizens without regard to sex.
Rep. Jackie Speier, D-calif., the sponsor of the resolution to repeal the ratification deadline, said there is no expiration date on equality.
“We demand that we be put into the Constitution,” Speier said.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the Constitution places no deadlines on the process of ratifying constitutional amendments and that Congress clearly has the authority to extend or remove any deadlines it chose to set previously.
“We are on the brink of making history and no deadline should stand in the way,” Nadler said.
Contributing: Associated Press