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January 18, 2025

Biden’s Equal Rights Amendment stunt is an effort to break the system

By Andrea Widburg

In one of his administration’s last bomb-throwing acts before leaving the White House, Joe Biden announced via a tweet that he believes that Virginia’s decision to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (“ERA”) in 2020 was sufficient to make it the law of the land. He’s wrong, of course, but the purpose is to force institutions to embrace the Amendment so that it’s incorporated into America even without force of law.

After the Civil War, the Constitution was ratified to make sure that all men of voting age, regardless of race, color, or prior status as a slave could vote. In 1920, the Constitution was ratified to remove limitations based on sex. In 1971, voting rights were further expanded by lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. In other words, all Americans, regardless of race, color, creed, sex, youth, etc., have equal voting rights.

Then, in 1972, Congress hopped on the feminist bandwagon and proposed the Equal Rights Amendment which, if passed, would become the 28th Amendment to the Constitution. The ERA, originally proposed in 1923, was intended to remove legal distinctions between men and women in matters of divorce, contracting, employment, etc. However, the 1964 Civil Rights Act did away with most of these hindrances, although it did not interfere with divorce laws, which are usually written to favor women.

Image: Phyllis Schlafly. Public domain.

Phyllis Schlafly understood this fact. She further understood that the ERA would have significant consequences, including making women vulnerable to the draft and removing the protections available to them under divorce laws, among other things. In other words, the ERA was redundant and could only be used for nefarious purposes. (Presciently, she argued that it would eventually be used to justify gay marriage—something we also got without the benefit of the ERA.)

Schlafly’s opposition carried weight, and by 1979—the original congressionally-set deadline for ratifying the amendment—only 35 of the necessary 38 states had ratified the ERA. Moreover, several states eventually rescinded their support for the ERA. Congress voted to extend the deadline until 1982, but the ERA’s proponents could not move the dial.

But leftists, as we know, are like the Borg in that they never give up. During Trump’s presidency, they picked up the fight to ratify the ERA, even though any new ratifications would be void ab initio (that is, void from the get-go) because the deadline had passed.

We all know that feeling. We find a great coupon in our unread mail, only to discover that it expired a week before. We’re disappointed, but we soldier on because a deadline is a deadline. Well, it’s a deadline for everyone other than leftists.

So it was that Democrat-controlled legislatures in Nevada (2017), Illinois (2018), and Virginia (2020) “ratified” the ERA. By the terms Congress imposed on the ERA, although these were symbolic acts, they were also legally meaningless.

That, however, did not stop Joe Biden from throwing a bomb right before Trump’s inauguration:

Of course, a president “affirming what I have long believed” is as meaningless as a state’s “ratifying” a proposed constitutional amendment after the deadline has expired. (And Congress does have the authority to set such deadlines.) Biden’s puppet masters know this. But they also know that leftists will respond by imposing the ERA on Americans’ consciousness and institutions. Thus, Wikipedia responded instantly by pretending that the Constitution now has 28 Amendments:

Amusingly, the moment they did that, Wikipedia’s editors did exactly what Schlafly predicted, which was to bring in the LGBTQ+ agenda:

Meanwhile, at Georgetown Law, which once actually had a good reputation, Victoria F. Nourse, the “Whitworth Professor of Law” and the Director of the Center on Congress and Democracy, announced that “President Biden’s carefully considered decision to recognize the Equal Rights Amendment’s status as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution brings the White House in line with the legal academy and profession.”

Sadly, she’s right about the legal profession, but only because America’s legal institutions have swerved so hard to the left that they are no longer recognizable as entities teaching young lawyers through a constitutional prism (which is how I was taught). Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg recognized that the ERA was dead in the water.

Nevertheless, the American Bar Association (which was already so leftist in the 1990s that I, still a Democrat, dropped my membership) is on board with Biden’s lie about the ERA. Indeed, in a longer statement about his belief, Biden specifically referenced the ABA as the progenitor of this ERA ratification idea:

The American Bar Association (ABA) has recognized that the Equal Rights Amendment has cleared all necessary hurdles to be formally added to the Constitution as the 28th Amendment.

Again, no, it hasn’t. The deal expired 38 years before the last faux “ratification.”

We are living in a very dangerous time. The left has been trying to destroy conservative lawyers by prosecuting them along with their clients. Shakespeare understood how dangerous this is, for he had one of his villains in Henry VI, Part 2, say, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

Tyrants hate lawyers because they are the common man’s bulwark against the state. As my criminal law professor said, every person, even if ultimately proven guilty, should have a knowledgeable friend at his side when he faces the awesome power of the state.

Meanwhile, leftists are steadily eroding the Constitution through institutions like law schools, which churn out a steady stream of Maoist activists. All of this has convinced me that we all should read Ilya Shapiro’s just-published Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites.

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