national I REPORTS
The Battle for VAWA An insider’s look at the five-year effort to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act O
N MARCH 16, I WAS PRIVILEGED TO JOIN PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN, members of Congress and longtime advocates to celebrate the signing of the newly updated Violence Against Women Act. It was a day that had taken our coalition, the National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic Violence, more than five years to reach.
That both chambers of Congress were in Republican hands back in 2017 as
we began our reauthorization effort wasn’t overly concerning. Congress had previously reauthorized (reviewed, improved and extended) VAWA in 2005 un- der the George W. Bush administration. But we only managed to get the 2013 reauthorization, with its trifecta of new and inclusive provisions (expanded pro- tections for immigrant survivors of violence, criminal jurisdiction for tribal courts to prosecute non-Indian perpetrators of domestic violence, and the first federal LGBT anti-discrimination provisions) accomplished because then-Vice President Biden called the then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) to request that the bipartisan Senate bill be permitted a vote in the House. Four years later, our coalition set out to improve the law with a bill that should
still garner bipartisan support. We always viewed it as a “modest improvements bill”—but some opponents would label it “radical” before we were finished. From the beginning, progress was slow in the Senate. With VAWA’s authorization set to lapse at the end of September 2018, some members of Congress wanted to intro- duce language to reauthorize the law “as is,” with no improvements. In a bid to
8 | SPRING 2022
stave that off, Democrats introduced our first House bill in late July 2018. That recharged our Senate discus- sions in the short term: Then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) asked his staff to lead the negotiations, and some progress was made. Howev- er, July 2018 was the same month that then-President Donald Trump nomi- nated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Several months later, our coalition
felt obliged to break off negotiations with the Republican staff of the Sen- ate Judiciary Committee, which had jurisdiction over both the Supreme Court confirmation process and the VAWA reauthorization. We penned a letter to Senate leadership expressing concern about the mistreatment of Christine Blasey Ford and the Re-
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DAWN R. STOVER; KELBIE KENNEDY
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