The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), a landmark 1994 bill aimed at curbing domestic and sexual violence, which currently has to be renewed every five years, lapsed in February. On Thursday, the GOP unveiled its counterintuitive, anti-Indigenous VAWA replacement.

There is a disturbing trend in Washington: elected leaders coming painfully close to seizing the solutions for some of this nation’s most pressing social issues, only to be undone by the cheapness of conservative politics. VAWA is just the latest example. But it’s unusually explicit: The 2013 VAWA and the more recent House VAWA reauthorization draft included a number of provisions designed to better protect American women—including Native women, currently threatened by a continent-wide crisis of violence. The Senate version announced Thursday gutted those provisions.

Adjacent to the scourge of domestic and sexual violence is the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis (MMIW), a national epidemic defined by high rates of violence visited upon Native women and by a ragtag federal reporting system that allows many cases to slip through the cracks. To help address that, and to empower Native nations to tackle these issues, the 2013 VAWA, as well as the version recently passed by the House, explicitly extended the authority of tribal courts to prosecute non-Native abusers and killers of Native women.

The Senate version of VAWA, sponsored by Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst, arrived after months of opaque holdups, and walks back this 2013 provision, instituting a series of restrictions on the jurisdictional reach of tribal courts. If it is passed, non-Native men who abuse Native women on tribal lands will no longer be required to adhere to the legal process as set forth by the sovereign nation’s judicial system, but could undercut that sovereignty by appealing to a federal court. Ernst also followed in the footsteps of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos by including language that would allow abusers to sue tribal nations if they feel their civil rights have been infringed upon during the investigation, despite the fact that tribal nations across the board already have legislation to ensure due process.



Ernst’s Senate bill also walked back other provisions from the House version passed earlier this year. The House bill in April closed what’s known as the “boyfriend loophole” in the original VAWA, making it possible to restrict gun rights for those convicted of violence against dating and living partners—not just, as in the original VAWA, those convicted of violence against spouses and families. Ernst chose not to include this popular stipulation.