Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday praised Eric Cantor for helping bring the Senate-passed Violence Against Women Act to the House floor for a vote, where it passed with mostly Democratic support.
Speaking at a Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month event in the White House, Biden, who wrote the original 1994 VAWA, described the House majority leader as “a man who has kept his word, a man who is viewed as sort of the anti-administration person but is a friend of mine, Eric Cantor.”
“He kept his word. He said he’d let the Congress speak. He could have prevented this from coming to a vote under the ordinary rules that had been employed in the past,” Biden said. “But he didn’t. So … I want to publicly thank him — because he kept his word. Where I come from, your word matters.”
Cantor voted against the Democratic version of VAWA. But during a closed-door Republican conference meeting earlier this week, he worked to persuade skeptical conservatives of the need to bring it to the floor, arguing that the GOP alternative didn’t have the votes, a source in the room said. Advocates have said he worked to bridge the divide between their wishes and those of the GOP’s right flank, but in the end, it apparently could not be done.
