Twenty-five years ago, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 (VAWA), a landmark piece of legislation designed to support and protect survivors of domestic violence, stalking, and sexual assault. Since the bill's enactment, the federal government has awarded more than $8 billion in grants to local, state, and tribal governments and organizations, enabling them to develop programs and services to best implement the law's purpose. In February, however, the law expired, and lawmakers have repeatedly come up short in their efforts to reauthorize the VAWA over the past ten months. Today, advocates, survivors, and at-risk communities are stuck waiting on a breakthrough from a divided Congress that cannot seem to agree on anything.

This failure is not for lack of trying. In the aftermath of the most recent government shutdown, it was House Democrats, actually, who allowed the law to expire by keeping a short-term extension of VAWA out of government-spending talks with Republicans. They did so in order to make substantive updates to the VAWA, which was last overhauled in 2013—a year before Republicans would obtain the Senate majority they have yet to relinquish.

At the time, periodic reauthorization of the VAWA was a largely noncontroversial legislative task. Lawmakers skirmished over provisions that bolstered protections for immigrant, LGBTQ, and Native American survivors, which some Republicans opposed. But the more expansive, Democratic-preferred version eventually won out, and by commanding margins: 78–22 in the Senate, and 286-138 in the House. The coalitions were also relatively bipartisan: In the Democratic-controlled upper chamber, 23 Republicans joined 55 Democrats and Democrat-aligned independents to pass the bill. In the GOP-controlled lower chamber, 87 Republicans joined 199 Democrats—not one Democrat voted no—to send the bill to President Barack Obama's desk.

This time around, the Democratic House passed H.R. 1585, the aptly titled Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2019, by a vote of 263–158. Among other things, the new-and-improved version closed the infamous "boyfriend loophole," which excludes people convicted of stalking or abusing a non-spouse partner from the scope of laws that limit an abuser's ability to obtain firearms. (Existing law covers a narrower set of relationships, such as those in which the abuser lived with or had a child with the victim.) Addressing this gap in the law has long been a priority for activists, and for good reason: Nearly half of women homicide victims in the United States are killed by current or former male partners, according to a 2017 study, and the Giffords Law Center says domestic-violence victims are five times more likely to be killed by their abuser if their abuser can obtain a gun.

The House bill incorporated other upgrades to the VAWA, too: It expanded the jurisdiction of tribal courts over non-Native men who abuse Native women, and strengthened provisions of the VAWA related to transgender survivors of domestic violence. Members of these demographic groups are disproportionately likely to experience domestic and sexual violence: More than half of American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced sexual violence or physical violence by an intimate partner, according to a 2016 report, and a 2015 survey found that 47 percent of transgender people report being sexually assaulted at some point during their lives. A total of 33 Republicans joined 230 Democrats to pass the bill. A single Democrat, Collin Peterson of Minnesota, broke ranks to oppose it.

In the Senate, however, momentum for the VAWA's reauthorization stalled. California Democrat Dianne Feinstein and Iowa Republican Joni Ernst began working to hammer out a bipartisan companion bill, but the objections of—who else?—the National Rifle Association, which had warned House Republicans that voting for the House bill would negatively affect their NRA ratings, proved to be a significant sticking point in the GOP-controlled Senate. (An NRA spokesperson characterized the bill to Jezebel as "a smokescreen for its real goal—banning firearms ownership.") When talks seemed to stall for good last month, Feinstein rolled out a compromise-free version of a companion bill, S. 2843. Her proposal tracks its House counterpart's proposed changes to the old version of VAWA, and the remaining 46 members of the Democratic caucus all signed on as co-sponsors.