Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has joined Louisiana and South Dakota in filing a lawsuit that aims to prevent renewed efforts to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution.
The ERA is, in the view of some of its proponents, on the cusp of becoming official due to a highly disputed legal process currently playing out.
The defendant in the suit will be Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, who is in charge of “administering the ratification process” for any amendment to the U.S Constitution, according to the archives’ website. Marshall claims that Ferriero “appears to agree with the activists’ approach” that want the ERA passed.
Marshall claims, “The people had seven years to consider the ERA, and they rejected it. To sneak it into the Constitution through this illegal process would undermine the very basis for our constitutional order.”
The ERA, long a cause of feminist voters across America, reads in full:
SECTION 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by
the United States or by any State on account of sex.
SECTION 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
SECTION 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.
The ERA was initially passed by both Houses of Congress in 1972 and went to the states for ratification. The amendment needed to be ratified by 38 state legislatures to become officially enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. In the proposing clause of the amendment’s passage through the House and Senate, Congress attached a seven-year deadline for ratification, a deadline that was later extended from 1979 to 1982.
The amendment did not receive the required amount of ratifications by 1982. As far as Marshall is concerned, that should have been the end of the issue.
Additionally, Marshall believes that five states validly rescinded their ratifications before the 1982 deadline. The question of whether a state can rescind a vote to ratify a constitutional amendment is not considered settled by legal scholars.
Proponents of the ERA believe that not only are the rescissions invalid but also the entire congressional deadline for ratification is constitutionally irrelevant. Those groups believe that since 35 states (not counting rescissions) initially ratified the ERA they only need three more states to approve ratification in modern times. In the last two years, they have won victories in Nevada and Illinois, putting the ERA, in their view, one state away from passing and becoming an official constitutional amendment.
The state of Virginia, in November 2019, elected Democrat majorities in both chambers of the state assembly, giving Democrats complete political control over the state of Virginia. As a result, Virginia is poised to become, in the eyes of certain groups, the 38th state to ratify the ERA.
Marshall thinks the recent actions taken attempting to ratify the ERA are “legally bankrupt” and his suit seeks to prevent the United States Archivist from validating their efforts.
“If this constitutional bait-and-switch is successful, there will be dire consequences for the rule of law,” Marshall said in a press release.
Marshall went on to add what he thought of the practical implications of implementing the ERA.
He stated, “While Alabama, Louisiana, and South Dakota are firmly committed to equality, the ERA would not promote true equality, but rather a far-left agenda. Where states have passed their own state-law versions of the ERA, courts have interpreted them to invalidate reasonable restrictions on abortion, require states to fund abortions, and mandate that boys be allowed to compete in sports against girls. And it is not hard to imagine courts using a federal ERA to threaten statefunded women’s shelters for excluding men, state prisons for housing women apart from men, or even state colleges for considering sex when assigning roommates.”
Marshall believes that if the United States is to pass the ERA it should start back over and pass it through the house and senate again. He cites liberal lion of the Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comments as evidence that people on the other side of the issue agree that the ERA should start over again in Congress.
“Until that time, Alabama, Louisiana, and South Dakota have filed our lawsuit to protect the progress women have made and the rule of law upon which we all depend,” Marshall concluded.
Henry Thornton is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News. You can contact him by email: [email protected] or on Twitter @HenryThornton95.
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