No - NOT the crappy misogynistic House version - the House has passed the SENATE version, which expands on protections for all women, including Native American women, victims of violence in same-sex relationships, and women who are immigrants.Hooray! This is especially important in states like Minnesota, where there have been terrible issues regarding non-tribal men abusing, raping, and beating women with impunity because they were not prosecuted under state or federal laws, and because they could not be arrested and prosecuted in tribal courts.
Another loss for ugly, immoral, unethical, and violently anti-women conservative values. Another defeat for the party that wanted to continue to let domestic abusers have guns, despite the horrific number of women murdered by intimate partners, especially their husbands.
Once again the anti-Tea Party / anti-extremist new members of the GOP voted with Democrats against their colleagues in the same party, as the GOP continues to fracture between sane moderates, and insane extremist ideologues.
Had the extremist pro-women beaters backed away from their unpopular anti-women views before the 2012 election cycle, that cycle might have been a lot different. But clearly the extremist in the GOP and the Tea Party are unable and unwilling to correct their positions when they are wrong or mistaken, or both. It is an ominous pattern of failure for the far right, but an encouraging turn of events for the nation.
I predict this will be the new political reality for 2013 and 2014: moderate Republicans repudiating their own failed and failing party to pass Democratic led legislation in this and the subsequent sessions of Congress.
This will NOT be a one-off; the conservative right is wrong, and some of them have the strength to fix what is wrong - even if it means going left.
From CNN:
By a vote of 166-257, the GOP version of the Violence Against Women Act failed to win a majority after almost 90 minutes of debate. The House then voted 286-138 to pass the Senate version, with 87 Republicans joining all 199 Democrats to provide majority support.
