The Senate has a tentative deal to renew the Violence Against Women Act, and we should all be horrified at what it took to get there. Thanks to the National Rifle Association, the “boyfriend loophole” will remain open, and people who commit domestic violence or stalking can keep their guns as long as they weren’t married to the partner they abused or stalked.

Under current law, married people convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence can be banned from owning or purchasing a firearm. Democrats thought that should also apply to unmarried people—the crime is the same, even if there’s no marriage certificate. But a Violence Against Women Act that closed the boyfriend loophole was not going to get 10 Republican votes to overcome a Republican filibuster.

VAWA will go forward without that provision, Republican Sen. Joni Ernst told CNN, because “Otherwise it doesn’t get done.”

This is a large majority of Republicans going to the mat to keep guns in the hands of criminals at the expense of their victims. When a version of VAWA passed the House in March 2021 (with 29 whole Republican votes), Ernst said, “Certainly we ran into hiccups with some of the gun issues, and that’s a big one for a number of us, stripping away people’s constitutional rights is not something that we should be doing.”

And the balance of power is such that Republican concern for the right of people who commit domestic violence to own guns is decisive.

”It needs 60 votes and in order to get anywhere near 60 votes that provision became controversial and we had to measure the remainder of the bill against that provision,” Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin said. “It’s a tough choice. We made a choice we thought was right.”

It probably was, weighing the entire bill’s fate against that one provision—though the provision is both important and nauseatingly commonsensical. But it’s horrific that this is the reality.

Ernst and Durbin, along with Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, formed the bipartisan group that came to the compromise, which was announced with actor Angelina Jolie, who told senators it would be “one of the most important votes you’ll cast in the Senate.”

President Joe Biden, a champion of the original Violence Against Women Act, expressed strong support for the deal, saying in a statement, “The VAWA Reauthorization Act of 2022 will expand prevention efforts and protections for survivors, including those from underserved communities, and will provide increased resources and training for law enforcement and our judicial system.  It will strengthen rape prevention and education efforts, support rape crisis centers, improve the training of sexual assault forensic examiners, and broaden access to legal services for all survivors, among other things.”

According to a press release, the bill does include other provisions previously opposed by Republicans, including expanded services for LGBTQ survivors and “Protect[ing] Indian women by improving tribal access to federal crime information databases and clarifying the existence of tribal criminal jurisdiction over non-Indian perpetrators of domestic violence, sexual violence, sex trafficking and stalking that takes place on tribal lands.”

Now the question is whether Ernst and Murkowski can really deliver the full 10—or 11, if Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Lujan remains away from the Senate after suffering a stroke—Republican votes needed to overcome a filibuster.