The Violence Against Women Act reauthorization cleared the Senate last week 78-22, and VAWA’s fate is left to the House of Representatives. VAWA will likely face more opposition in the House, where conservatives object to provisions that protect Native American, LGBT, and undocumented victims.

According to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, Rep. John Duncan (R-TN) has not decided where he will fall on reauthorizing VAWA. But he said he will not be misled by the bill’s title, even though it is named for what it does — protecting women from domestic violence:

“Every bill is given a motherhood-and-apple-pie title,” Duncan said outside the House chamber. “But if you voted [based] on the title, you’d vote for every bill up here. If we’d all done that, the country would have crashed a long time ago.

“So this is another bill with a motherhood-and-apple-pie title,” he added.

While Duncan claims he opposes domestic violence against women because “most men can handle [violence] a little better than a lot of women can,” he said his vote will come down to the cost.

Of course, VAWA is not simply conveniently titled. Since its inception in 1994, VAWA has driven down violence by creating community programs for women, improving the prosecution of sex offenders, and assisting victims with legal costs and resources. The Senate’s version includes new, expanded protections that cover LGBT individuals and Native Americans.

Four senators, Jim Risch (R-ID), Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Ted Cruz (R-TX) previously suggested that any effort to prevent violence against women exceeds the federal government’s power under the Constitution. Earlier this week, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) joined their club of senators who think legislation reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act is unconstitutional:

Some Republicans have objected to new provisions in the law, including one allowing tribal courts for the first time to prosecute men who aren’t American Indians when they’re accused of abusing an American Indian woman on a reservation. . . .

[JOHNSON]: “the Senate has approved a piece of legislation that sounds nice, but which is fatally flawed. By including an unconstitutional expansion of tribal authority and introducing a bill before the Congressional Budget Office could review it to estimate its cost, Senate Democrats made it impossible for me to support a bill covering an issue I would like to address.”

In fairness to Johnson, his objection is much narrower than the one raised by senators like Paul and Cruz, and applies only the provision of the VAWA renewal that would permit tribal prosecutions against non-members of the prosecuting tribe. Nevertheless, Johnson is simply wrong about the Constitution.

It is true that the Supreme Court held back in the 1970s that tribal courts do not have criminal jurisdiction over non-Native Americans, but that decision concluded that “Indian tribes . . . give up their power to try non-Indian citizens of the United States except in a manner acceptable to Congress.” More recently, the Court’s 2004 decision in United States v. Lara recognized that Congress “does possess the constitutional power to lift the restrictions on the tribes’ criminal jurisdiction over nonmember Indians.” The reasoning of that decision would also apply to a law expanding tribal jurisdiction further to include non-Native Americans who engage in violence against women on reservations.

So Johnson is wrong about the Constitution, and his opposition to protecting Native American women is downright cruel. Eighty percent of Native American rape survivors were attacked by non-Indians, and a 2010 report by the General Accounting Office determined that federal prosecutors “declined to prosecute 46 percent of assault matters and 67 percent of sexual abuse and related matters.” As a result, many reservations are virtually law free zones for serial rapists who prey upon Native American women without consequence.

Since then-Delaware Senator Joe Biden first authored the law in 1994, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has earned bipartisan praise for providing vital protections against domestic violence and assistance to victims. But of the eight Senators — all Republicans — who voted Monday against even considering VAWA renewal, at least four apparently did so because they believe the bill is unconstitutional.

Several of these senators have expressed similarly radical views about the constitutional role of the federal government in other contexts. Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) claimed that national child labor laws, Social Security and Medicare violate the Tenth Amendment, for example; and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) once led a Tenth Amendment project at a conservative think tank and co-authored a paper proposing an unconstitutional process to nullify the Affordable Care Act. The four senators who claim that the Violence Against Women Act is unconstitutional are:

• 1. Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID): In a statement, Risch explained: “It is at the state and local level where I believe enforcement and prosecution must remain. The federal government does not need to add another layer of bureaucracy to acts of violence that are being handled at the state and local level. In addition to my 10th Amendment concerns, this legislation raises additional constitutional questions regarding double jeopardy and due process. I opposed this legislation, however well intended it was, because it is another effort of the federal government extending its reach into the affairs of state and local jurisdictions.”
• 2. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): In a 2012 letter explaining his opposition to last year’s VAWA re-authorization attempt, Paul wrote: “Under our Constitution, states are given the responsibility for prosecution of those violent crimes. They don’t need Washington telling them how to provide services and prosecute criminals in these cases. Under the Constitution, states are responsible for enacting and enforcing criminal law. As written, S. 1925 muddles the lines between federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement.”
• 3. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT): In 2012, Lee claimed VAWA “oversteps the Constitution’s rightful limits on federal power. Violent crimes are regulated and enforced almost exclusively by state governments. In fact, domestic violence is one of the few activities that the Supreme Court of the United States has specifically said Congress may not regulate under the Commerce Clause. As a matter of constitutional policy, Congress should not seek to impose rules and standards as conditions for federal funding in areas where the federal government lacks constitutional authority to regulate directly.”
• 4. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): A Cruz spokeswoman told ThinkProgress: “For many years, Senator Cruz has worked in law enforcement, helping lead the fight to ensure that violent criminals—and especially sexual predators who target women and children—should face the very strictest punishment. However, stopping and punishing violent criminals is primarily a state responsibility, and the federal government does not need to be dictating state criminal law.” While the statement does not explicitly call VAWA unconstitutional, his previous comments leave little doubt that that is what he means.

These senators’ apparent belief that the federal government cannot constitutionally play a role in preventing violence against women is not even shared by most Republican members of Congress. 216 House Republicans agreed just last year that the Constitution does not prohibit a version of the Violence Against Women Act. The Supreme Court did strike down one piece of VAWA in 2000, but it left most of the law intact.

While the other four Senators who voted against the “motion to proceed” did not respond to a request for an explanation of their votes, Sen. Tim Scott (R) voted for the watered-down House version of VAWA last year and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) claims he supports a scaled-back version of the legislation.

Eight Senators on Monday voted not to consider the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, a bill that protects victims of domestic violence. The Senators who voted against moving to debate on the bill were: Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT), Tim Scott (R-SC), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Mike Johanns (R-NE), Rand Paul (R-KY), Pat Roberts (R-KS), and James Risch (R-ID).

VAWA’s reauthorization has been caught up in partisan gridlock over added provisions that would protect undocumented immigrants, as well as LGBT and Native American victims of domestic violence. Congress failed to reauthorize the bill by the end of 2012, and the Senate is now considering the same legislation again, in its new legislative session.

All of the women in the Senate, with the exception of Sen. Deb Fischer (R-NE), co-sponsored the legislation.

Once Senators consent to take up the measure, it will be voted on in its entirety. It is expected to pass, but will face a tougher battle in the House.

By the last day of the 112th Congress, legislators figured out a way to avert the fiscal cliff, but they hadn’t fulfilled their other responsibility: To reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. The bill had been caught up in partisan bickering for months, and, thanks to Republican resistance to provisions protecting LGBT, undocumented, and Native American victims, a final version was never passed.

Another push for the reauthorization of VAWA is expected to hit the Senate floor next week. And while there will still be arguments over the protection of some of those groups, thanks to the immigration reform efforts by President Obama and the so-called ‘gang of eight,’ undocumented women might not be among them.

One of the largest sticking points for Republicans about the Senate’s latest version of VAWA was that it included an expansion of the ‘U-Visa’ system — visas extended to people who are undocumented, but have been victims of crimes, including rape, stalking, and domestic abuse. Congress has previously capped U-visas at 10,000 a year; Republicans did not want to expand the system, since it provides a pathway to legal status for women who sought one.

The reasons for such visas are clear — if women fear that they will be deported from the country, or that police will feel no need to help them since they are not legally in the country, they are far, far less likely to report crimes committed against them. The low cap on U-visas (which the government hit before the end of year several times) acted as another deterrent for reporting crimes.

Now that the President and members of Congress are suggesting a measure that would give green cards to all undocumented people who qualify, U-visas will be rendered a moot point. Victims of domestic violence will be able to call the police without fear of deportation. That means that women who, as Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) put it, are “living in the shadows” will be able to come forward and report the crimes committed against them.

Of course, this does nothing to help protect the LGBT or Native American victims who still go without protection. Nor does it help to get VAWA, finally, renewed. But bringing undocumented people into the fold — letting them be the Americans they have wanted to be for so long — will help shine a light on crimes that have gone under-reported and victims that have gone without help.

Rapists should be legitimately prosecuted, but Eric Cantor has ways of shutting that whole thing down

As Irin Carmon explains in a must read piece at Salon, Native American reservations are virtually law-free zones for women victimized by non-Indian rapists. Eighty percent of Native American rape survivors were attacked by non-Indians, and these crimes are currently beyond the reach of tribal authorities. Meanwhile, federal officials have the theoretical power to prosecute sexual assaults on reservations, but they lack the resources to do so. The result is that many abusers quickly learn they are free to attack women without consequence:

“We have serial rapists on the reservation — that are non-Indian — because they know they can get away with it,” said Charon Asetoyer, executive director of the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center in Lake Andes, S.D. “Many of these cases just get dropped. Nothing happens. And they know they’re free to hurt again.” . . .

Overall, American Indians are two and a half times likelier to be victims of violent crime than the general population, according to the Department of Justice. But a 2010 report by the General Accounting Office found that there is an unusually high rate of refusals to prosecute by U.S. attorneys, who “declined to prosecute 46 percent of assault matters and 67 percent of sexual abuse and related matters.” The report noted that violent crimes actually had a higher rate of declination, possibly because the evidence was harder to come by.

A major step towards solving this problem is the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act, which passed the Senate with strong bipartisan support last April. Among other things, this bill would restore tribal authorities’ ability to prosecute non-Indians who commit domestic violence against the members of their tribe. According to the Census Bureau, 39 percent of Native women are subject to domestic violence at least once. Many of these incidents involve rape.

In the House several top Republicans, including members of the House Leadership, proposed a compromise bill that would extend these protections to Native domestic violence victims while allowing defendants to remove their case to federal court. Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), however, reportedly refuses to accept any protections for Native women that would expand tribal jurisdiction. As a result, there is a very real danger that Cantor will kill the bill by simply waiting out the clock until the new Congress is sworn in.

In the immediate aftermath of the Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock debacles, one would think Cantor would be willing stop standing on the side of rapists for purely political reasons, even if he cannot actually bring himself to care about holding rapists accountable. Apparently, however, the #2 man in the House still stands with the likes of Akin and Mourdock.