Mr. President, you have the ability and now is the time: Pass the Equal Rights Amendment | Opinion
Now that Joe Biden has entered his final months as the American president, he is considering some changes that previously would have been considered unachievable, including an endorsement of major changes to the Supreme Court.
Perhaps he should consider the Equal Rights Amendment.
Opinion
After all, if voters elect her, America may have its first female president in Kamala Harris. What better way to usher in her presidency than making all people, regardless of gender, equal in the eyes of our nation?
The Equal Rights Amendment states, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” It has met every hurdle to become a constitutional amendment but stalled for more than 100 years thanks to an arbitrary deadline enforced by a handful of powerful, misogynistic men beginning in the ’1970s and continuing until this day.
“Until discrimination against women is explicitly prohibited by the Constitution, the systems of power and access in our country will continue to exclude our full participation and leave us vulnerable to attacks by extremists who want to roll back our hard-won civil rights,” said Darcy Totten, interim executive director of the California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls.
Troubled history of the ERA
The ERA was first proposed by suffragettes Alice Paul and Crystal Eastman and was originally introduced by Republican congressmen. It was then subsequently reintroduced in every Congressional session for half a century. The ERA came extremely close to ratification in 1978 when 35 states voted to ratify — including California, which ratified the federal ERA in November 1972.
But ratification required (and still does) the support of at least 38 states; and despite there being no mention of a ratification timeline in Article V of the U.S. Constitution, the ERA was given a seven-year deadline by politicians who sought its failure for either misogynistic or political reasons. (States did not get to vote on this new rule.)
By the time the arbitrary deadline came in 1978, no additional states had opted to ratify the proposed amendment, and the proposal was left to molder on Congress’ backroom shelves.
The amendment has languished ever since, even though, in 2020, Virginia became the final, necessary 38th state to ratify the ERA. At that point, then-President Donald Trump declined a request from the National Archives to publish the ERA as an amendment, citing the previous — and unjustifiable — ratification deadline that had long passed and has never since been enforced.
Meanwhile, in this election year, New Yorkers could become the latest to ratify an Equal Rights Amendment, enshrining gender equality in their state constitution — if not yet the national constitution. There is still national interest in gender equality, even if Congress would like us to forget about it.
Biden already plans changes
President Biden is already planning on announcing his endorsement of major changes to the Supreme Court, according to The Washington Post, which may include proposals for legislation to establish term limits for the justices and an enforceable ethics code.
The Post also reported that the president may call for a constitutional amendment to eliminate broad immunity for presidents and other constitutional officeholders. Lending his support to the ERA would be a natural extension of those plans, and shore up widespread support among women, heading into an election year that is already crucial to women and reproductive rights.
“The Equal Rights Amendment would not just halt the steady repeal of our rights, but shoot us 100 years forward in terms of progress toward equity and equality for all of us,” Totten said. “Women are half the citizens of this nation — we deserve our place in our nation’s most sacred governing document.”
Biden has already publicly declared his support for the ERA. He wrote last year from the White House, marking the ERA’s 100th anniversary, that he has “long supported the ERA since I first ran for public office — and it is long past time that we heed the will of the American people and make this Amendment the law of the land. No one should be discriminated against based on their sex — and we, as a nation, must affirm and protect women’s full equality.”
Biden should direct the Justice Department to rescind the Trump-era memo that took the position that ratification of the ERA is time-barred. Doing so would finally push through the Equal Rights Amendment, saving it from its fate as a weakly italicized footnote in history textbooks — and just in time for the country’s first female president.
