As Joe Biden was getting his coat and leaving the White House, he has announced that he has ratified the equal rights amendment! Just like that! He can do that? What took him so long?
But legal experts contend it isn’t that simple: Ratification deadlines lapsed and five states have rescinded their approval, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school, prompting questions about the president’s authority to ratify the amendment more than 50 years after it first passed.
Biden is leaning on the American Bar Association’s opinion, the senior official said, which “stresses that no time limit was included in the text of the Equal Rights Amendment” and “stresses that the Constitution’s framers wisely avoided the chaos that would have resulted if states were able to take back the ratifying votes at any time.”
This is an interesting bomb to throw back over his shoulder. Will Trump fight it? Is this another issue that will tear the Republican party apart? Will Zombie Phyllis Schlafly rise from her grave to haunt the halls of Congress?
I approve of the core principles of the amendment, but I also approve of any effort to sow chaos in the Trump administration.
The more worrying part of that story is that 5 states have rescinded their ratification.
What??
Prediction: Democrats will do nothing. Republicans will avoid saying anything (except for the usual suspects) because they know the thundering dunderheads on the Supreme Court will make it vanish for them.
Maybe if Biden had done this at the beginning of his term and gathered the resources to make it stick, it would have meant something. As it is, this is just a useless old guy making an empty gesture.
Republicans and Democrats favored the ERA at first, until Phyllis Schlafly started campaigning and saying it would abolish single-sex public restrooms, and you’d have men peeing at a urinal next to a woman’s bathroom stall.
Sound familiar? Conservatives are obsessed with excretion.
Sorry, the Democrats appear to be a day late a dollar short. Again. Why wasn’t this addressed sooner? Sounds like plenty of loopholes for the Republicans to explore, or extort, with the SOTUS as a last resort.
PZ @3:
“Sound familiar? Conservatives are obsessed with excretion.”
Not at all surprising. They are mostly a bunch of pissants.
I’m guessing that PZ’s predictions @2 are correct; and even if this makes the news at all and somebody actually pushes it, I don’t doubt that SCOTUS’ gang of six will find some apologetic that allows them to show us who they really are yet again.
One can hope, though. 8-)
I actually like the idea of light subversion. This isn’t it.
Give these short-attention-span people an endless stream of something to focus their hatred on, but make it entirely inconsequential.
As an example, Democrats could start wearing their flag broaches upside down.
I suppose my point is to distract and run out the clock.
I first heard about the ERA in the late ’70s when in high school. I figured it was a no brainer. It not being ratified was the beginning* of my disillusionment with government.
I was around for Viet Nam and Nixon but wasn’t old enough to pay attention. Their contribution to the disillusionment came later.
PZ, No 3., I’m old enough to remember those arguments: If the ERA is ratified, we’ll have gay marriage, women serving in combat, and men using women’s bathrooms. What’s funny is that we ended up getting all of that anyway even without the ERA. So I wonder what the current arguments against it would be.
Note: Yes, I know, trans women are women, but not to the people who oppose the ERA. So far as they’re concerned it’s men using women’s bathrooms. So from their standpoint all that stuff happened even without it.
All this proves that ‘equal rights’ in any respect in this country/society/world is a sick joke!
^nbsp; Martha and the Vandellas were right, Sing it with me: Nowhere to Run to baby, nowhere to hide!
And, with that empty gesture, biden has shown, once again, that he is a FRAUD. The members of the corporate owned dnc are his backup singers in that terrible off-key dirge!
Nobody will give this a second thought in the chaos unleashed in Trump’s first 100 days.
Biden is leaning on the American Bar Association’s opinion, the senior official said, which “stresses that no time limit was included in the text of the Equal Rights Amendment”…
Um…didn’t the ERA have a sentence saying the States had seven years to ratify it?
Also, in any case the President has absolutely ZERO role in ratifying Constitutional amendments.
Speaking of Phylis Schlafly… I was trying to look something up on Conservapedia (I know, I know) yesterday and it was incredibly slow. Then it just died completely. I only get timeouts now. Maybe Andrew Schlaflys head exploded when he read about this that the resulting shockwave took out his favorite project at the same time?
Correction: there was NOT a time limit. The third part of the amendment is: “Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.”
This is from the CNN coverage on Biden’s statement:
So, Biden is expressing an opinion. It won’t change the state of the 28th which is still in limbo.
Also, per that article, there was no time limit in the amendment when it passed Congress and there is no limit unless it’s stated in the amendment. The 27th amendment took almost 203 years to be ratified.
However, congress did set a date in the joint resolution (H.J.Res. 208) that sent the amendment to the states which was “within seven years from this date”…this date being March 22, 1972, so March 22, 1979. There was an attempt to extend that deadline with another joint resolution but that only got a simple majority.
So, in a word: it’s legally murky…stupidly murky. Everyone should have equal rights.