“But it requires now, at this moment, 60 votes in the Senate.” “We’ve lived this way, unequally, for as long as we’ve been in existence, and to some extent we can’t quite grasp that we actually can change this,” Jenkins said. While anti-abortion lawmakers lean hard on the lightning rod as their reason to oppose the ERA, advocates are trying to convince a larger cohort of right-leaning senators such as Shelley Moore Capito and Mitt Romney to cross party lines. The amendment now faces an uncertain fate in the Senate, where only two Republicans – Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins – have jumped onboard. Last year, and again several weeks ago, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives voted largely along partisan lines to remove the ERA’s congressional deadline, ignoring the justice department’s guidance under Trump. We’re just trying to get this on the books,” said Robin Bleiweis, a research associate with the Women’s Initiative at the Center for American Progress. “Really, at this point, I think we’re just trying to get it done. In March, North Dakota lawmakers nevertheless voted to rescind their support as well.ĭespite so many roadblocks, the ERA’s proponents are still looking for ways to finish the work their predecessors started soon after successfully advocating for the right to vote. Similarly, debate persists over whether the five states that tried to rescind, withdraw or sunset their approvals can actually do so, although precedent around past amendments suggests they probably can’t. The deadline “expired long ago”, the judge wrote, and recent ratifications “came too late to count”. Last month, a federal judge weighed in, dismissing arguments made by several state attorneys general who were trying to get the ERA certified as the 28th amendment. But the former president’s justice department claimed the new ratifications didn’t pass muster, setting up a showdown over whether Congress’s arbitrary deadline rendered them moot. ![]() ![]() Suddenly, nearly 100 years of advocacy had reached its apex: the endorsement of 38 states. ![]() Then, during Donald Trump’s incendiary tenure that brought the plight of American women into stark relief, three holdout states, Nevada, Illinois and Virginia, ratified back to back. The ERA languished for decades, nominally re-introduced in Congress year after year but largely sidelined and ignored. “We will not again seriously pursue the ERA until we’ve made a major dent in changing the composition of Congress as well as the state legislatures,” said Eleanor Smeal, then the president of the National Organization for Women. That time limit eventually got extended to 1982, but in the meantime, anti-feminist attacks haunted messaging around the amendment, stifling progress.īy the early 1980s, proponents were only able to drum up support from 35 states – three short of the required threshold – even as Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho, Kentucky and South Dakota tried to invalidate their previous decisions to ratify. When Congress passed the ERA in 1972, lawmakers imposed a seven-year deadline for ratification by at least 38 states. It’s outrageous – a scandal, quite frankly – that women still have to be in the begging position for their rights Carol Jenkins But it quickly garnered enemies in the form of conservatives with traditional values, who would eventually ensure its demise. Proponents argue the ERA would send a powerful signal and be used as a tool to effectively challenge restrictions and loopholes currently undermining people’s hard-won protections.Īs chronicled in last year’s hit television series Mrs America, the fight for the ERA ramped up in the 1970s, bolstered by a strong feminist movement. It would also give Congress the power to enforce gender equality through legislation, and would take effect two years after ratification. “It’s outrageous – a scandal, quite frankly – that women still have to be in the begging position for their rights,” said Carol Jenkins, president and chief executive of the ERA Coalition and the Fund for Women’s Equality.įirst drafted in 1923 and revised over the years, the proposed article is a constitutional guarantee 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”. But amid legal controversies, disingenuous talking points and a chronic lack of urgency, the landmark amendment still faces an uphill battle.
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