Opinion: Sorry, Virginia, you can't revive the Equal Rights Amendment (via latimesopinion)
In January, when a new Democratic majority takes over in Virginia, the Commonwealth likely will become the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. At that point, the proposal will cross the three-quarters threshold for inclusion in the Constitution, almost a half century after the amendment went to the states. Understandably, the ERA’s supporters will be jubilant. Though I endorse the ERA, I can’t join them.will be stillborn and the Equal Rights Amendment will still be dead.
Neither controversy came to a head, however, because the second deadline came and went without a sufficient number of states on board, and the ERA was deemed finished. The historian and former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Mary Frances Barry pronounced the amendment a “failure”; another supporter said it had “lost.” Everyone supposed that proposed amendments did not last forever, that they couldn’t be acted upon by the states decades or centuries after Congress voted.
When confronted with these belated ratifications of a stale proposal, the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice opined that proposed amendments could be ratified over centuries. But it did a rather poor job of countering the old orthodoxy or reconciling its views with contrary Supreme Court pronouncements.
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