WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 -- The sister of Nicole Brown Simpson made an emotional appeal Tuesday to a Senate committee Tuesday to restore $22 million in proposed cuts for programs to help battered women, saying Congress continues to 'play politics while women die.' 'It is the women whose deaths do not make it on the evening news who are counting on this Congress to do what is right,' Denise Brown told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee. 'If the Senate does not fully fund the Violence Against Women Act, you are condemning hundreds of thousand more women and their children to lives of despair and death.' 'The House and Senate continue to play politics while women die,' said Brown, whose former brother-in-law, football superstar O.J. Simpson, is accused of killing his ex-wife and her friend, Ron Goldman. During that trial, prosecutors noted that police had been called several times to the Simpson household stemmming from reports of domestic violence. In memory of her sister, Denise Brown established the Nicole Brown- Simpson Charitable Foundation. The Senate panel, headed by Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter, was reviewing House proposals to spend about $40 million from the Crime Trust Fund on VAWA programs run by the Health and Human Services Department, including money for women's shelters, rape prevention and education programs and domestic violence hotlines. The National Network to End Domestic Violence estimated that $61.9 million is needed to fully fund those programs. Both the House and Senate are seeking to cut between $50 million and $77 million from the $177 million the network estimates is needed to fully fund law enforcement grants and other domestic violence programs under the Justice Department.
Brown and five other women, who gave tearful and harrowing accounts of abuse suffered by them or relatives, are among a growing chorus opposing a myriad of spending cuts the GOP is planning as part of its 1996 federal budgtet. The GOP-controlled Congress is trying to implement an ambitious plan to cut spending by $1 trillion to balance the budget by 2002 and provide $250 billion in tax cuts. Critics, mostly Democrats -- including President Clinton -- have argued that the proposed cuts in a number of social, welfare, education and health programs will have devastating effects. 'I don't have to tell you about how tight funding is,' said Specter, one of four Senate Republicans running for president. But he did promise to press for full funding of $50 million for women's shelters. 'They have the money,' Brown said after the hearing. She earlier asked Republicans on the full Appropriations Commmittee 'not as senators but as men to do what is right.' Also at the hearing, Education Secretary Richard Riley defended one of the House's key targets for elimination -- President Clinton's 'Goals 2000' education program. Critics worry the program, which provides federal funds for states and local communities to upgrade academic standards and make other reforms, represents federal interference in issues that local governments should decide. Riley countered that was a misconception and that the statute that established the program 'specifically reaffirms that control of education is reserved to the states and local school systems.' Clinton, who visited an Illinois college town Monday, lambasted the GOP-controlled Congress of using the 'smokescreen of a balanced budget' to cut major education programs, including 'Goals 2000.'
