Equal Rights Amendment advocates received a blow from one of the bill’s biggest and most consequential supporters when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that she believes that the deadline to ratify the ERA as a constitutional amendment has long expired. Instead, she recommends that efforts to codify the ERA start from scratch.
It’s not what ERA supporters wanted to hear from Ginsburg, who has long been one of the ERA’s strongest allies, and it puts a damper on their most recent campaign: In January, Virginia became the 38th—and arguably final—state to ratify the amendment, which simply states that, “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Advocates argue that the Virginia vote triggered the threshold needed to pass the bill, even 48 years after it was first proposed.
But the decades-long fight has been riddled with setbacks and arbitrary deadlines. In January, The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel released an opinion stating that it was far too late to ratify the ERA, citing the March 1979 (and later 1982) expiration date initially set by Congress in 1972 and the five states that have since rescinded their support for the ERA. Meanwhile, ERA advocates have argued that the expiration date can be ignored if Congress so chooses because it was not written in the amendment itself and only its preamble, and that the Constitution doesn’t formally acknowledge rescission in the first place.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
