The Violence Against Women Act is
set to expire at the end of September, which, being as Congress doesn't reconvene until September 4th, gives both the House and Senate together just 11 legislative days to reauthorize the law. In spite of previous versions of the legislation passing with bipartisan support, the updated measure introduced to reauthorize funding for violence prevention and redress services (shelters, attorneys, that sort of thing) doesn’t have a single Republican co-sponsor, and had to be introduced in the House of Representatives instead of the Senate for the first time, which suggests that the bill's champions in the Senate were not confident of having sufficient or immediate support. The bill will also have to be signed into law by the current president and, if it signals anything, the Department of Justice is responsible for carrying out VAWA but the head of the DOJ, Jeff Sessions, opposed even a more modest version of the Act in 2013 when he was a Senator. I also frankly think we know what the general attitude of the current president toward questions of domestic and sexual violence is by the many accusations that stand against him and any number of his campaign and White House hires to date and by the way that he and his have thus far responded to them.
What I'm trying to say is that I'm not at all confident that this crucial law will be reauthorized. This is an important law and I think it would be remarkable if the governing political party's response to the popularization of the #MeToo movement over the last year were indeed to allow this law, which is the only federal law that treats domestic and sexual violence as serious crimes (and yes its services
do attend to male victims as well; the name of the law simply recognizes who the principal victims of such violence overwhelmingly are), to expire. That would say quite a lot about what the Republican Party has become of late.