By a near-party-line vote of 232-183, the House of Representatives today passed a resolution removing the deadline for ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment, an amendment barring discrimination based on a citizen's sex. Republicans were against it, and in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is expected to toss the resolution into his garbage can, as he has with nearly everything else the House has sent him since Democrats won a majority in the lower chamber in 2018.
The intent of the resolution was to nullify one of the key current claims against final ratification of the ERA, after Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the would-be constitutional amendment nearly 50 years after its 1971 introduction. Even liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was dubious that the Virginia ratification, passed "long after the deadline passed," would allow the amendment to go forward, noting that other states have rescinded their support in the intervening years.
If the Senate were willing to pass the House resolution, then, it would remove one of the major roadblocks to ratification, but not the other. Current hard-right states such as Idaho and the increasingly theocratic Tennessee would insist that their deratifications be taken into account, and the Supreme Court would still have to take up that half of the question. Given that the court itself is now hard-right, the ruling on that would be preordained.
If the Equal Rights Amendment is ever to become law, the effort likely needs to start from scratch. That is not a bad plan, in fact: Remove the mewling "process" excuses hard-right conservative lawmakers have staked their opposition on and make the question plainer again: Will you vote for an amendment granting equal protections to women, or will you not? The founders clearly did not overlook such rights, but excluded them purposefully. Is it time, in the 21st century, to formally reject that exclusion?
The most common conservative complaint is that, like every other declaration of civil rights before it, an Equal Rights Amendment is not necessary because here in Real-Life America, equality is already self-evident. While the thought is lovely, in other words, putting it on paper is simply too wasteful to be bothered with.
The more direct Republican opposition, however, comes from exact opposite calculation: An Equal Rights Amendment would almost certainly take a wrecking ball to Republican anti-abortion laws across the country, laws intentionally written to strip rights from half the population.
That seems like a public fight worth having yet again. Put it on the ballot in every state and let's see where we stand. For the record: The House originally passed the Equal Rights Amendment by a bipartisan 254-to-23 vote, back in 1971. The Republican venom toward equal rights for America's women is something that’s developed more recently.