#War On Women Fail

Don’t think the Democrats will give up on their silly “war on women” theme. On the contrary, as long as they think there are still some voters dumb enough to be duped, they will keep it up. Thus, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz sent out this email to the party faithful a little while ago:

This week, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. Here’s how the vote went: Sixty-eight in favor, thirty-one against.

Each of the 31 senators who voted against it were Republican men.

Every time these guys get the chance to put women’s health before politics, they fail to.

But how is it good politics to vote against the Violence Against Women Act? Obviously, the main point of the venture from the Democrats’ perspective is to generate fundraising appeals like this one:

Democrats are facing an important FEC fundraising deadline this Monday at midnight.

Stand with the only party standing up for women in 2012 — donate $3 or more to Democrats today.

Next Ms. Wasserman Schultz lets the cat out of the bag, if the reader is paying attention:

I should add that these 31 men are the only senators to ever cast a vote against reauthorizing this act: The Senate reauthorized it unanimously twice in the last twelve years.

So why, this year, are there 31 No votes? Obviously, because the Senate Democrats have slipped in some new provisions that have nothing to do with violence against women, and everything to do with satisfying the Democrats’ special interest constituents. Once again, you can easily figure this out if you know the code:

Next, this legislation goes to the House. The House GOP is planning on introducing a bill with the same name, but their version of the Violence Against Women Act will likely strip out the very provisions protecting Native Americans, undocumented immigrants, and LGBT Americans we just fought for.

In other words, it will reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act in its original form. I wrote about the Democrats VAWA scheme here and here. You can get all the details from those posts. Here are a few of the highlights: The Democrats’ Senate version of the bill adds 10,000 U-visas annually, but the Democrats refused to include any protections against immigration fraud in the issuance of such visas. The bill extends the criminal jurisdiction of Indian tribal courts to cover non-Indians; this has to be unconstitutional. And the Democrats’ bill includes hundreds of millions of dollars for grant programs, but the Democrats rejected all audit and oversight provisions, even though a Department of Justice investigation found that in the past, some grantees have misused more than 90% of the money they received through VAWA. This was my conclusion in a prior post:

So what we have here is another case of the Democrats attempting to use a program that is popular but little-understood, the Violence Against Women Act, to advance their collateral political agendas by facilitating waste, immigration fraud, and so on. When Republicans offered reforms to prevent these blatant abuses, the Democrats howled that Republicans are trying to kill the Violence Against Women Act. The Democrats think their voters are dumb enough to fall for this kind of nonsense. They are probably right.

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