The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) may have made sense for a certain time and place, but Democrats’ continued attachment to this 20th century relic has never made much sense. So it’s not with much chagrin that I report that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has declared the ERA dead.
Initially, Congress said the ERA—passed in 1972—would be obsolete if not ratified by the required three-quarters of state legislatures by a 1979 deadline. Later, Congress extended this deadline to 1982. It still wasn’t met.
“We conclude that Congress had the constitutional authority to impose a deadline on the ratification of the ERA and, because that deadline has expired, the ERA Resolution is no longer pending before the States,” DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel said in a January 6 opinion, released yesterday.
In recent years, two new states voted to ratify the long-dead legislation—Nevada in 2017 and Illinois in 2018—and Virginia is expected to do so this year, becoming the long-needed 38th state. But some states that do not support the ERA have been asking, What about that deadline? So the National Archives and Records Administration (which is tasked with verifying state ratification) asked the DOJ for guidance.
It would be fine, the Office of Legal Counsel said, for “Congress to restart the ratification process by proposing it anew.” But it takes issue with the idea that “the congressional deadline was invalid or could be retroactively nullified by Congress.”
“The Supreme Court has upheld Congress’s authority to impose a deadline for ratifying a proposed constitutional amendment,” states the DOJ’s opinion. “Both Houses of Congress, by the requisite two-thirds majorities, adopted the terms of the ERA Resolution, including the ratification deadline, and the state legislatures were well aware of that deadline when they considered the resolution.”
This ruling “doesn’t directly affect the litigation,” University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck told CNN. But “unless it is overruled by the attorney general or the president, it likely will bind the archivist—meaning that the only way a new ratification by a state like Virginia would likely be effective is if the courts say so.”
FOLLOW-UP
“The United States is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it,” said President Donald Trump in a televised address to Iran yesterday.
“This is unequivocally good news,” as Eric Boehm wrote at Reason yesterday. “But once the threat of war has mostly passed, observers should start asking: What exactly has the saber-rattling of the past week accomplished for the United States?”
The House will vote today on a War Powers Resolution sponsored by Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D–Mich.). It mirrors the one that Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine introduced in the Senate, and it says the Authorization for Use of Military Force that preceded the second Iraq war doesn’t mean Trump can target Iran at his will.
“In the briefing and in public, this administration has argued that the vote to topple Saddam Hussein in 2002 applies to military action in Iraq,” Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) told CNN yesterday. “That is absurd. Nobody in their right mind—with a straight face, with an ounce of honesty—can argue when Congress voted to go after Saddam Hussein in 2002 that (they) authorized military force against an Iranian general 18 years later.”
Meanwhile…Lindsay Graham, folks:
“You know, they’re libertarians.” https://t.co/KU4lVlcwIj
— Jane Coaston (@cjane87) January 8, 2020
QUICK HITS
- The Cato Institute “is calling on Congress to investigate whether the FBI is spying on it and other domestic political groups after public records requests raised the possibility that the Bureau has files on Cato and others,” reports Reason‘s C.J. Ciaramella.
- RIP Elizabeth Wurtzel. The writer, credited as the “inventor of the modern confessional memoir” and one of the first to open “a dialogue about clinical depression,” died this week of breast cancer.
- “Lawyers for the state have backed down from a recent claim that New England Patriots football team owner Robert Kraft committed a felony prostitution offense a year ago,” reports the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
- Alex Nowrasteh looks at immigrant deaths in U.S. detention facilities.
- Protecting and serving:
The cop I wrote about in the post below got no jail time for lying about an alleged vehicular assault. If the guy he wrongly accused had been convicted, he’d be looking at a minimum of 5 years. https://t.co/Yg8dso3nuE
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) January 9, 2020
- Jeffrey Tucker weighs in on Tyler Cowen’s assessment that the U.S. libertarian movement has “hollowed out.”
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2N52hJJ
via IFTTT