![]() On Januthe House of Representatives and Senate introduced joint resolutions affirming the validity of the Equal Rights Amendment and removing the time limit from its preamble. And Virginia ratified it on January 27th, 2020. But in 2017 Nevada ratified the ERA the first state in 40 years to do so Illinois ratified in 2018. While Alice Paul began it all in 1923, and Congress passed the ERA in 1972, by 1982 only 35 states had ratified, three shy of the necessary 38. There has been extraordinary progress in the movement toward full equality. Our team of legal scholars has examined the next steps to a fully realized Equal Rights Amendment. We work with legislators on the amendment and other ERA bills. We strategize with states seeking ratification. The ERA Coalition is comprised of more than 290 national and local partner and supporter organizations across the country representing millions of advocates working for the equality of all. For the last quarter-century, the Supreme Court has acted as if the Constitution contains a provision forbidding discrimination on the basis of gender.Our goal is to amend the Constitution to ensure that one cannot be discriminated against because of one’s sex. The Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified, he wrote, yet “today it is difficult to identify any respect in which constitutional law is different from what it would have been if the ERA had been adopted. He quoted Ginsburg’s view that “there is no practical difference between what has evolved and the ERA.”Īnother prominent legal thinker, University of Chicago Law School professor David Strauss, made the same observation in a 2001 Harvard Law Review article. As far back as 1997, the legal scholar and journalist Jeffrey Rosen wrote that the Equal Rights Amendment had effectively been enacted “by judicial fiat,” thanks to Supreme Court decisions holding sex discrimination to be nearly as repugnant to the Constitution as racial discrimination. In 1972, when Congress approved the ERA, the Supreme Court had not yet clarified that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment protects women from unfair sex discrimination. As a matter of substance, an addition to the Constitution is no longer needed to guarantee legal equality of the sexes. Ginsburg also acknowledged that the main benefit of an Equal Rights Amendment at this late date would be its symbolic value. ![]() It’s a ludicrous argument, as preposterous as the claims by some Trump lawyers that he could be “reinstated” as president. That was merely an “ arbitrary deadline” and should not be considered binding. That was four decades after the ratification cutoff date established by Congress had come and gone. On what basis can anyone insist that the ERA never expired? Pressley, Cardin, and the others make much of the fact that three additional state legislatures - in Nevada, Illinois, and Virginia - did eventually vote to ratify the amendment, purportedly bringing the total to the required 38. Yet at a recent Capitol Hill press conference, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland put on a show of amendment denialism that was as divorced from reality as the 2020 election denialism of former president Donald Trump. Congress cannot undo the results of an amendment ratification process any more than it can undo the results of a presidential election. ![]()
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