The “Violence Against Women Act” is being debated in Congress and the politics of the issue have, naturally, drifted in the Virginia Senate race.
Tim Kaine was out front on the issue (and raising money on it), portraying those Republican Senators who opposed or had questions about the bill as having a “narrow and intolerant ideology.”
Not to be silent on the bill, George Allen issued this statement on Wednesday afternoon:
I support the Violence Against Women Act. It is a law that I voted for in the past and it should be reauthorized. My hope is that it doesn’t get bogged down in the Washington mentality of turning anything and everything into a political football during an election year. I have always had a strong record of holding criminals accountable for their violent acts as well as protecting the victims of crime.
All well and good.
But does any of this change the possibility that there might be serious problems with the proposed reauthorization?
CEI’s Hans Bader gathered a number of them together in this post. None of the questions, problems or concerns have to do with violence against women. They have everything to do with violence against civil liberties and free speech. Former ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer’s entry is just one example of how the law will strip students of their due process rights. Her conclusion?
Should a few troubling provisions in VAWA governing campus disciplinary proceedings doom the bill in its entirety? Maybe not (though the provisions should surely be amended). VAWA is a lengthy, complex bill providing federal resources for victims of violence and domestic abuse and for anti-violence initiatives.
I can and have argued for and against provisions of VAWA. (I was for the definition of sexual violence as a federal civil rights violation before I was against it.) In U.S. v Morrison, the Supreme Court struck down VAWA’s extension of federal civil rights remedies to victims of gender-motivated violence. It ruled that neither the 14th Amendment nor the Commerce Clause empowered Congress to assume federal jurisdiction over sexual violence claims — providing legal remedies to sexual violence should be the province of the states, and the federal government shouldn’t be able to exercise un-enumerated and virtually unlimited power. At the risk of betraying my sex, I had to agree. The defense in a war on women should not be a war on liberty.
It is perfectly reasonable, then, for people to disagree with the reauthorization as proposed, and even want to slow down its approval until those flaws are fixed, without them somehow being anti-women or pro-violence — and certainly not the Neanderthals described in Tim Kaine’s crass fundraising pitch.
But those explanations take time — and once you start explaining, you’ve lost the battle.
Tim Kaine took the easy way out. So did George Allen.
In the end, we’ll all be saddled with a law that, because of its title alone, is just about impervious to reservations or harm.
Something for folks to think about — including, but not limited to, those who write anonymous blog comments.
