Cornyn and advocates blame Democrats for stalling rape kit test funds
By Benjamin Wermund
Houston Chronicle
October 3, 2019
WASHINGTON — Every five years, Debbie Smith watches as Congress comes to the brink of letting the federal program bearing her name expire.
But lawmakers always found a way to pass the Debbie Smith Act, which sends resources to crime laboratories across the country to test rape kits and DNA evidence from other unsolved crimes, in the end.
In an odd way, it helped keep Smith’s faith in government — until now.
Funding for the program expired at the end of September as lawmakers left for a two-week recess without renewing it for the first time in its 15-year history. She and other advocates are blaming Democrats for rolling it into their rewrite of the Violence Against Women Act — a much more complicated bill with a long history of getting caught up in partisan fights.
Smith says the funding is urgently needed. A report from the federal Government Accountability Office earlier this year found that the number of backlogged requests for crime scene DNA analysis at state and local government labs increased by 85 percent — from about 91,000 to about 169,000 — from 2011 through 2017.
“People don’t think Congress works together at all. I would always tell them yes they do,” said Smith, a rape victim who saw DNA evidence in her case go untested for five years, before those tests finally helped police find a suspect.
“But now I’m starting to be as cynical as they are,” she said. “This is the one thing they could always agree on.”
Nobody is doubting the need for the legislation, which authorizes the Department of Justice to send $151 million in grants to state and local law enforcement agencies to complete forensic analyses of crime scenes and untested rape kits. More than 641,000 DNA cases have been processed since it became law.
How the bill should be passed, however, is another matter.
The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed it as part of the Violence Against Women Act in April. That legislation drew just 33 Republican votes in the House and includes a provision closing the so-called “boyfriend loophole” by prohibiting those convicted of abusing or stalking a dating partner from owning guns.
The National Rifle Association opposes the Violence Against Women Act, which hasn’t moved in the Republican-controlled Senate.
The Senate, meanwhile, passed a standalone version of the Debbie Smith Act in May. It was as bipartisan as it gets: Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, led a group senators from both parties in pushing the bill, which passed unanimously.
Cornyn, who is in Houston on Thursday to talk to city officials about the importance of the funding, blasted Democrats for failing to act on the Senate bill.
“There was absolutely no problem reauthorizing this critical program in 2008 or 2014 but clearly the times have changed,” Cornyn said in a speech on the Senate floor just days before the funding expired. “And our House Democrat colleagues aren’t above politicizing something as noncontroversial as reducing the rape kit backlog.”
House Democrats argue the Debbie Smith Act fits well with the broader legislation, which is meant to protect women. They say both pieces of legislation are urgently needed.
The Violence Against Women Act, which also expired earlier this month, established the National Domestic Violence Hotline and the Office of Violence Against Women in the Justice Department. It also helps fund shelters and has sent billions in grants to programs aimed at preventing domestic violence, sexual assault and more.
U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, a Houston Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, which passed the Violence Against Women Act, said they were put together because “there was a sense of trying to get it all done.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Democrats are so busy trying to dump Trump that they haven’t found the time to fund the testing of those rape kits.
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