The House is poised this week to pass a measure that would revive the long-dead Equal Rights Amendment by repealing the 1982 deadline imposed on states to ratify it.
The measure, H.J. Res. 79, would “permanently reopen the ratification process for the amendment by eliminating the deadline,” the Congressional Budget Office reported.
The amendment has gained new life in recent years. Many of the women in the House Democratic Caucus sported ERA pins during President Trump’s State of Union address on Tuesday and wore white to symbolize the suffragist movement.
But the effort to resuscitate the ERA faces significant obstacles.
The GOP-led Senate is unlikely to endorse the House measure.
“I’m personally not a supporter,” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said last week.
Even if the Senate cleared the measure, the Justice Department has ruled it would be unconstitutional.
House lawmakers must start over if they wish to ratify the ERA, the Office of Legal Counsel ruled in January.
“Congress may not revive a proposed amendment after a deadline for its ratification has expired,” the OLC wrote. “Should Congress wish to propose the amendment anew, it may do so through the same procedures required to propose an amendment in the first instance.”
The amendment was first introduced nearly a century ago but did not gain traction until the 92nd Congress in 1972, when it cleared both chambers with the required two-thirds supermajority.
The 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.”
Congress imposed a seven-year deadline for the required 38 states to ratify it. That deadline was eventually extended to 1982, but the amendment failed to win ratification, falling short by three states.
In the time since the deadline passed, five states have withdrawn their support for the amendment, while three others, Nevada, Illinois, and Virginia, have voted to ratify it.
The Democrat-led Virginia General Assembly ratified the amendment on Jan. 15.
Proponents of the amendment have ignored the five states that withdrew support and pronounced Virginia to be the 38th state, the final one required to ratify the amendment.
“Equality should be for everyone,” Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy, who sponsored the amendment in Richmond, said before the vote in a chamber packed with cheering women.
House Democrats say the ERA is needed to ensure an end to discriminatory policies against women, such as lower pay, pregnancy discrimination, and sexual harassment.
“With ongoing efforts by the federal and state governments to undermine equality under the law based on sex, it is clear that an Equal Rights Amendment is more important than ever,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat.
Republicans point out that the Supreme Court has already ruled Congress must start over with the ERA and cannot retroactively change the deadline.
The House attempted to start an effort to pass the ERA a second time in 1983, but it fell short of the two-thirds votes needed.
Republicans accused Democrats of moving to illegally revive the ERA because Virginia’s legislature flipped to Democrats in the 2019 elections, which provided the votes to ratify it.
“Congress does not have the constitutional authority to retroactively revive a failed constitutional amendment and subject citizens in all 50 states through the current political trend in just one state,” said Rep. Doug Collins, a Georgia Republican.
