Posted on 03/01/2023 11:02:52 AM PST by Alas Babylon!
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WSFA) - A federal appeals court has ruled against backers of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment, which would have become the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had it been ratified before a Congressionally-mandated deadline ran out in the 1970s.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall hailed Tuesday’s ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit as “a significant victory for the rule of law” after Alabama and four other states sued to prevent the U.S. Archivist from certifying the ERA as a constitutional amendment.
Tuesday’s ruling is decades in the making.
Congress submitted the proposed ERA to the states for ratification in 1972, at which time it placed a seven-year deadline on the ratification process. That deadline passed before 38 states approved it. In 2018, however, Nevada brought the decades-old ERA back to the forefront when it approved ratification.
Illinois and Virginia quickly followed Nevada’s lead, becoming the 37th and 38th states to greenlight the ERA. That milestone prompted supporters to proclaim the ERA had reached the constitutionally-required approval of three-quarters of the states to become the law of the land. The three states then filed a lawsuit aimed at forcing the Archivist to certify the amendment’s official ratification, though Virginia later dropped out of the suit.
Alabama, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Dakota and Tennessee then sued to prevent the Archivist from performing the certification, asserting that Congress’ seven-year deadline had long since passed and any attempt to enact the ERA as a new amendment would have to start with a new amendment process.
Tuesday’s ruling affirmed the position of the five conservative states with the court holding that “the ERA’s deadline barred Plaintiffs’ late-coming ratifications,” and rejecting challenges that the deadline was invalid or could be ignored.
While the ruling is of course correct I seem to remember from college government class that the USSC has original jurisdiction in cases involving disputes among the states. Should not this be a the USSC to begin?
At one point Congress did (illegally) extend the deadline, but that didn't help. Thank you, Phyllis Schlafly!
Young White girls love a good protest, the guys attend to pick up chicks.
Correct.
At one point Congress did (illegally) extend the deadline, but that didn't help.
Correct again. Congress used the Legislative Process, rather than the Amendatory Process in Article V, to extend the deadline by 3 years, but a federal court struck it down. Some articles on this subject name the drop-dead date as June 1, 1982, but the real date on which the ratification window closed was June 1, 1979.
Attempts to execute belated ratifications were simply virtue signaling. Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that if this issue came before the Supreme Court, she would have to hold her nose and vote with the conservatives.
Yep, if this had been ratified, it would be just as legitimate as Biden’s election was.
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