WASHINGTON - Nineteen years to the day after passage of the Violence Against Women Act, Arkansas Democrats on Friday blasted U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton for opposing separate Republican and Democratic efforts to reauthorize the measure.
Cotton, who is running for the U.S. Senate in 2014, was the only member of the Arkansas delegation to oppose both versions of the bill.
“Tom Cotton’s reckless votes have failed the women of Arkansas,” said Democratic Party of Arkansas Executive Director Candace Martin.
Former state Rep. Janet Johnson said the 4th Congressional District Republican’s vote was “irresponsible” and “extreme.”
“When Tom Cotton voted against the Violence Against Women Act, whose values was he representing? They aren’t Arkansas values. They are not Arkansas priorities,” the Democrat said.
The congressman’s spokesman said Cotton voted against both bills because he questioned whether they would withstand a legal challenge.
“Tom and virtually everyone in Congress, in both parties, agree that we need to prevent violence against women and children and that we need to crack down hard on criminals,” Cotton’s communications director, Caroline Rabbitt, said in a written statement. “Tom has been focused on making sure that Congress passes a Violence Against Women Act that will survive court scrutiny and he was concerned that this bill, like past versions, would not.”
President Bill Clinton signed the Violence Against Women Act into law on Sept. 13, 1994, creating an Office on Violence Against Women within the Justice Department and toughening federal penalties against certain sex offenders. It also included a federal “rape shield law,” making it harder for defense attorneys to introduce evidence at trial about accusers’ past sexual history.
President Barack Obama signed the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act into law on March 7, after it passed the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-controlled Senate by lopsided margins. Sen. Mark Pryor, a Democrat, voted for the legislation; Sen. John Boozman, a Republican, voted against it.
The new law authorizes about $660 million per year in spending for programs providing temporary shelter, counseling, legal assistance and other services for domestic-violence victims. It adds protections for homosexuals who are victims of domestic violence.
It also gives Indian tribes jurisdiction over non-Indians who are accused of domestic violence or violating a protective order on a reservation. Many Republicans argued that it would be unconstitutional to make non-Indians defend themselves in tribal criminal proceedings.
Arkansas’ four congressmen, all Republicans, voted against the 2013 reauthorization legislation in its final form, but three of them, U.S. Reps. Tim Griffin, Rick Crawford and Steve Womack, supported a Republican version that altered provisions dealing with tribal sovereignty and removed same-sex couples.
Cotton believed that the Republican version was also vulnerable to legal challenges, Rabbitt said. “The House version was better than the Senate version, but Tom felt it was not as strong as it should be,” she said.
Griffin, who represents Little Rock and much of central Arkansas, said the dispute is, in large part, about partisan politics, not women’s safety. The Republicans oppose violence against women, and the Republican proposal, he said, “was a better bill.”
Front Section, Pages 2 on 09/14/2013