Congress votes to renew landmark domestic violence law

Congress has renewed a 1990s-era law that extends protections to victims of domestic and sexual violence, updating the landmark Violence Against Women Act nearly three years after partisan disagreements caused it to lapse.

It passed this week as part of a $1.5 trillion government funding package and capped years of work by members of the House and Senate. It is certain to win the signature of President Joe Biden, who worked on the law during his days in the Senate.

Passage of the legislation brought a rare moment of bipartisan agreement in the Congress, achieved partly on the strength of the personal connections that lawmakers have to domestic violence and its devastating effects.

For North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer, the connection is his adopted son whose biological mother was murdered by her husband. For Sen. Lisa Murkowski, it's the need to expand the tribal jurisdiction over non-Indian offenders in her home state of Alaska. For Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, it comes back to the frantic phone calls she received at the Houston Women’s Center in the 1990s. And for Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, the drive to reauthorize the law is partly rooted in her own experience as a survivor of sexual assault.

“I know firsthand the horrific experience too many women face at the hands of a perpetrator," Ernst said in a statement. “That’s why for three years I’ve worked diligently and across the aisle to craft a bill that will modernize this important law to ensure my fellow survivors are supported and empowered.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who first helped write and pass the original bill as a House member in 1994, called it “one of the most important laws passed by Congress in the last 30 years.”

Yet the reauthorization of the law, which aims to reduce domestic and sexual...