As it became evident that Virginia was on the cusp of ratifying the ERA, the Trump administration Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) released a legal opinion declaring the ERA expired. When a constitutional amendment is ratified by the requisite number of states, federal law tasks the United States Archivist (the head of the National Archives) with certifying and publishing the amendment. Illinois followed suit the following year, and in 2020, Virginia provided the final ratification necessary to reach the ¾ requirement set forth in Article V. Congress extended the deadline to 1982, but instead of securing additional ratifications during that time, five states instead tried to rescind their prior ratifications–an action that had questionable legal effect, but nonetheless sent a clear message: the ERA’s momentum had stalled.īut, in 2017, thirty-five years after the extended deadline expired, and in the midst of the “Me Too” movement, Nevada put the issue back on the table and ratified the ERA. Thirty-five states soon ratified the ERA, but opposition to the proposal brought the ratification process to a halt. Congress then sent the proposed amendment to the states for ratification, and, as had become standard practice, included a seven-year deadline in the proposing clause. That year, the amendment passed both chambers of Congress with bipartisan support far exceeding the two-thirds majorities required by the Constitution. Lawmakers proceeded to introduce this version of the ERA in every session of Congress for the next thirty years, but it wasn’t formally proposed for ratification by the states until 1972. The new version would firmly establish that the “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” and provide Congress with the explicit authority to enforce this requirement with appropriate legislation. Twenty years later, Alice Paul rewrote the ERA to better reflect the language in the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments. The original text of the amendment, which was first introduced to Congress in 1923, stated: “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and in every place subject to its jurisdiction.” Recognizing that securing the right to vote was only an initial step toward full equality under the law, women’s rights activists pushed for the introduction of the ERA a few years later. It took another fifty years before the women’s suffrage movement would achieve its goal of amending the Constitution to grant women the right to vote with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Anthony tried to invoke that right in the 1872 presidential election, pointing to the newly enacted Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws to “any person,” she was arrested, convicted, and fined. In 1869, Wyoming became the first state to grant women the right to vote–but when Susan B. But advancing women’s legal rights in the United States has never followed an easy or straightforward path, and the ERA’s journey has been no exception. Thirty-eight should have been the magic number: Article V of the United States Constitution, which lays out the process for Constitutional amendments, provides that a proposed amendment becomes part of the Constitution as soon as it is ratified by ¾ of the states. In January 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).
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