Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I wish to first thank the Senator from New Mexico for his great leadership on this issue. This is a national issue. It is a bipartisan issue. It crosses geographic lines. Those of us who have significant tribal communities know how important these provisions are to this bill. We tried very hard on the Judiciary Committee to make sure this bill is consistent with the bipartisan work we have done in the past, but we also saw it as an opportunity to consolidate some of the programs to save money and then to look at areas where we needed to be more sophisticated, where we needed to respond to changing issues in the law. Certainly, the tribal jurisdiction issue was one of those major issues. I rise today to talk about the importance of this bill. It is a law that has changed the way we think about violence against women in the United States of America. The Violence Against Women Act is one of the great legislative success stories in the criminal area in the last few decades. Since it was first passed in 1994, annual domestic violence rates have fallen by 50 percent. Now, you usually cannot say that about criminal prosecution efforts. I usually do not have that kind of number. But that is what we have--since 1994, a 50-percent difference in domestic violence rates. People have stopped looking at the issue of domestic violence as a family issue, and they have started treating domestic violence and sexual assault as the serious crimes they are.…”