COMMUNITY
Jordan Sellergren / Little Village
Iowa Dispatch
How a Bill Becomes a Reauthorized Law Lobbyists aren’t all bad. BY RACHEL GRABER
The Iowa Dispatch features the voices of Iowans scattered around the country and the world, offering a local perspective on national and international issues.
I
n Washington D.C., no one ever invites me to dinner parties. Of course, no one has dinner parties to invite me to; it’s all about happy hour, a recreation in which I rarely take part. My colleagues in the gender-based violence field and I joke that no one wants to talk to us at social gatherings, because we’re downers. We are stuffed to the gills with facts, statistics, horror stories, laws, legislation and court cases related to intimate partner violence—not great conversation fodder. After decades of viewing lobbyists as 12 Feb. 5–18, 2020 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV278
a corrupting force in government (which they certainly are in many cases), I’m still a little embarrassed to tell people that I’m a lobbyist. I invariably preface “lobbyist” with “nonprofit” or add, “I work on domestic violence issues,” when anyone inquires after my profession. Sometimes I even say, “I’m a lobbyist for the good guys.” My official title is director of public policy. When I moved to D.C., my knowledge of the federal, behind-the-scenes legislating process was based largely on the dramatic depiction in Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde. In truth, as in the movie, 20- and 30-something-year-old staff do most of the work. And while hyper-partisanship flourishes on the public stage, many staff people work together across the aisle in good faith, particularly on certain issues—including domestic violence. Everyone agrees on one basic premise: domestic violence and other forms of gender-based violence are bad. Washington D.C. is abound with Iowans, especially people from Iowa City. In fact, women from Iowa City working for members of Congress were pivotal to both the eventual passage of the 2013 Violence Against Women Act reauthorization and the drama of the three years leading up to it. Being an Iowan
in D.C. is, in many ways, a strength. I can talk both as a resident of a (small-ish) urban area and as someone with experience working in a rural community. Certainly, I am not an “East Coast elite.” And, while I have not found people from elsewhere in the country to be unpleasant, Iowa nice is a real thing. Genuine friendliness is an asset to a lobbyist. In my professional world, reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is a rite of passage. VAWA is the big bill—the headline-grabbing, soundbyte-producing, anguish-causing, war-on-women bombshell. Gender-based violence impacts every person in America. One in four women and one in seven men experience intimate partner violence; one in five women and one in 71 men experience rape in their lives. Whether they know it or not, everyone reading this publication has a family member, friend, colleague or acquaintance who has experienced gender-based violence. VAWA, originally passed in 1994, is one of the pillars of the federal government’s response to domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and stalking, providing grant funding for state and local efforts to combat these crimes and to serve survivors. It is currently unauthorized. Money is still
