Virtue-Signaling Virginia: Ratifying The ERA When It’s Too Late

Virtue signaling doesn’t get any cuter than this: Both houses of the Virginia General Assembly voted yesterday to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. 

Thirty eight years after the deadline had expired.

Yet feminists and others in Richmond were celebrating as if they’d freed women from slavery.

Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy declared that they were taking “the vote of a lifetime.”

“One hundred and sixty million women and girls across this country are waiting and will forever be changed by what happens in this body here today,” she said.

Oh, please.

Someone break the news to Delegate Foy that it’s too late.

We know what’s going on. This was designed to get politicians on the record . Anyone not voting for the measure can be slammed as anti-woman in the next election.

Yet, some news outlets pretended it mattered.

Virginia Becomes the 38th and Final State to Ratify the ERA, Mother Jones

Virginia Approves the ERA, Becoming the 38th State to Back It, NYT

Did Virginia Just Amend the Constitution? The Atlantic. (Answer: The courts will decide.)

A brief civics lesson: Constitutional amendments must pass both houses of Congress with a 2/3 majority and be ratified by 3/4 of the states. For the math impaired, that’s 38 states.

The Equal Rights Amendment, a moth-eaten measure with more wrinkles than a Shar-Pei, passed Congress in 1972 with bipartisan support. The deadline for ratification by 38 states was March 22, 1979.

When that date approached and only 35 states had ratified, Congress extended the deadline until June 30, 1982. 

When the second - and final - deadline expired the number was still stalled at 35. Sort of. You see, when South Dakota voted to ratify the ERA it added a sunset clause. If the measure wasn’t passed by 1979, its ratification would expire. 

Complicating matters, four other states: Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho and Kentucky, voted to rescind their ratifications.

Legal scholars disagree about whether it’s legal for states to withdraw ratification. The courts have not yet weighed in.

Despite the dusty deadlines, Nevada ratified the ERA in 2017, Illinois voted to ratify in 2018 and Virginia just joined the virtue signalers yesterday.

When Virginia politicians voted, they ignored a legal opinion that the DOJ issued last week declaring that the ERA resolution had expired and it was too late for states to ratify the ERA.

Congress may not revive a proposed amendment after a deadline for its ratification has expired. 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, consistent with Article V of the Constitution.

No doubt this opinion will be blamed on troglodytes in the Trump administration rather than on men and women at Justice who understand the law even when it disappoints the sisterhood.

It’s ironic that a measure that’s supposed to enshrine fair play in the Constitution is being pushed by people bending rules and ignoring drop-dead dates to do so. They want deadlines to be retroactively extended and yet they want the states that rescinded their ratifications to be ignored.

Fact is, discrimination is already illegal. And the Constitution protects the rights of women as well as men. Reread the 14th Amendment if you don’t believe me.

While you’re at it, name one right men enjoy that I don’t.

I’ll wait.