Under the aegis of the three-state strategy, two more states were able to ratify the ERANevada in 2017 and Illinois in 2018leaving the ERA just one ratification shy of being adopted as part of the Constitution of the United States. WebCongress voted in favor of adding the new language to the Constitution back in 1972 and sent it to the states for ratification. The resolution must be adopted by a vote of at least two-thirds of the membership of each house of the legislature. The length of time between a constitutional amendments proposal by Congress and ratification by the states, therefore, is relevant only when a ratification deadline has not been fixed in advance., The Supreme Courts decisions in Dillon and Coleman, therefore, do not address the central issue raised by the current campaign to ratify the 1972 ERA. The relevant consensus is not about a generalized problem, but about the proposed constitutional amendment as a solution. Similarly, in Coleman v. Miller,REF the Court discussed whether a proposed amendment had been ratified within a reasonable period of time.REF Neither of these decisions treatment of this issue is relevant to the 1972 ERA. Hawaii was the first state to ratify what would have been the 27th Amendment, followed by some 30 other states within a year. The five states that rescinded their ERA ratifications were: There is some question regarding the legitimacy of the five rescissions, for several reasons. The state ERA was passed first in the Senate, then in the House. 3, Getting to the National Archives in Washington, DC. Cookies collect information about your preferences and your devices and are used to make the site work as you expect it to, to understand how you interact with the site, and to show advertisements that are targeted to your interests. READ MORE: Why the Fight Over the Equal Rights Amendment Has Lasted Nearly a Century. Between 1957 and 1959, she and several federation leaders toured the state stumping for the amendment. Webtional origin. In Coleman, the issue was whether the courts had authority to override Congress judgment about whether the time between an amendments proposal and ratification was reasonable. Identical legislation can be, and often is, introduced in the next Congress, but it is new legislation for which the legislative process must begin again. Fifty years ago today, the U.S. Senate passed the Equal Rights Amendment, following the lead of the House of Representatives and paving the way for it to become Lewis, Jone Johnson. Just like a joint resolution for proposing a constitutional amendment no longer exists when the Congress in which it is introduced adjourns, a proposed constitutional amendment no longer exists when its ratification deadline passes. All Rights Reserved. (In order to become part of the Constitution, a proposed amendment must be ratified by three-fourths, or 38, of Contemporary efforts to make the ERA part of the Constitution fall into two categories. The Equal Rights Amendment, in its most recently proposed form, reads, Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex., READ MORE: How Phyllis Schlafly Derailed the Equal Rights Amendment. Four years later, when considering Senate Joint Resolution 25, the Senate first voted 5131 for an amendment offered by Senator Carl Hayden (DAZ) that read: The provisions of this article shall not be construed to impair any rights, benefits, or exemptions conferred by law upon persons of the female sex.REF The Senate then voted 6319 for the amended version.REF. Cities | One year later, 30 states had ratified the ERA, including Washington, which ratified the amendment on March 22, 1973, becoming the 30th "Yes on ERA" state exactly one year later. Fourth, this argument fails again to distinguish between amendments that have no ratification deadline and those that do. Article V of the Constitutiondeals with the process of amending the Constitution, but it deals only with ratification and does not empower states to rescind ratifications. When you visit the site, Dotdash Meredith and its partners may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. They create a baseless distinction between ratification deadlines that appear in an amendments text and in a joint resolutions proposing clause. Thirty-eight should have been the magic number: Article V of the United States Constitution, which lays out the process for Constitutional amendments, provides that a proposed amendment becomes part of the Is this useful? Since Congress has taken no action to change the 1972 ERAs ratification deadline, the only way to do so is by ignoring that deadline altogether. In 1971, Representative Griffiths introduced HJ Res 208, which would ultimately become the Equal Rights Amendment. This strategy, along with new women legislators' assistance, paid off. A proposed amendment is pending before the states until it is ratified by three-fourths of the states or expires if fewer than that number ratify it by any deadline that Congress has imposed. Neither the House nor the Senate has voted on a resolution to propose the ERA in more than three decades. Under the leadership of U.S. Representative Bella Abzug of New York and feminists Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, it won the requisite two-thirds vote from the U.S. House of Representatives in October 1971. Jone Johnson Lewis is a women's history writer who has been involved with the women's movement since the late 1960s. https://www.tshaonline.org, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/texas-equal-rights-amendment. Since the President has no role in the constitutional amendment process,REF however, a joint resolution proposing an amendment is sent to the Office of the Federal Register (OFR) for publication and transmittal to the governor of each state.REF, States that ratify an amendment send authenticated ratification documents to the OFR which, in turn, notifies the Archivist of the United States when such documents are received from three-fourths of the states. Ultimately the proposed Amendment did not meet the requirement that it be ratified by at least 38 states before the 1982 deadline (only 35 states ratified the Amendment by 1982), so it was not added to the United States Constitution. The Madison Amendment was pending indefinitely because it had no ratification deadline, while the 1972 ERA not only had a deadline, but that deadline, even after one extension, passed in June 1982. There was no doubt when Congress proposed the ERA in 1972 that its ratification deadline, placed in the resolutions proposing clause, was binding.REF The fact that Congress not only imposed the deadline, but acted to extend it before that deadline passed, shows that Congress considered it valid. Changing the day will navigate the page to that given day in history. RELATED: Rauner under pressure to support Equal Rights Amendment. Not exactly. How to vote | The other two unratified amendments had ratification deadlines. Ballotpedia features 407,095 encyclopedic articles written and curated by our professional staff of editors, writers, and researchers. 6 By the fall of 1977, 35 states had ratified the ERA and, by the March 1979 deadline, five of those states had passed resolutions rescinding their ratifications.REF On October 26, 1977, Representative Elizabeth Holtzman (DNY) introduced House Joint Resolution 638 to extend the deadline until June 30, 1982. The ERA is properly before the states for ratification, several scholars wrote in 1997, in light of the recent ratification of the Madison Amendment.REF This effort became known as the three-state strategy because, ERA advocates claimed at the time, ratification by three more states would add the 1972 ERA to the Constitution. Congress first proposed 12 amendments on September 25, 1789, and the states ratified 10 of them, known collectively as the Bill of Rights, on December 15, 1791.REF The states have ratified 26 of the 27 amendments in an average of 20 months.REF The 27th, also known as the Madison Amendment, was ratified on May 7, 1992, nearly 203 years after Congress proposed it. The possibility of additional states ratifying the 1972 ERA depends on the validity of its ratification deadline. The issue is whether the 1972 ERA remains pending before the states. A CRS report at the time stated the obvious: [I]f [the ERA] receives approval in the form of ratification by 38 States before June 30, 1982, the measure will become the [next] Amendment to the Constitution.REF, As Professor Grover Rees put it when analyzing the 1972 ERAs deadline extension: The entire caserests on a single contention: in 1972, when Congress forwarded to the states that sheet of paper containing the ERA and the time limit, the time limit was in the wrong place on the paper.REF Rather than establish this proposition, however, ERA advocates simply repeat this observation: When the time limit is in the proposing clause, however, as with the ERA, it is not part of the amendment and is not ratified by the States when they ratify the amendment.REF, The notion that states may ignore restrictions appearing in the joint resolutions proposing clause presents a problem that ERA advocates have never addressed. In July 1982, after the 1972 ERAs extended ratification deadline had passed, the Acting Solicitor General prepared a memorandum for the Administrator of General Services explaining why this legal challenge should be dismissedand later asked the Supreme Court to do so. Peter Keegan / Archive Photos / Getty Images, Ratification Via Article V vs. "Three-State Strategy". Neither case involved a similar kind of amendment: Dillon involved an amendment with a ratification deadline in its text, while Coleman involved an amendment with no ratification deadline at all. The ERA language ratified by 35 states between 1972 and 1982 did not contain such a time limit, so the ratifications stand. Virginia Could Ratify The Equal Rights Amendment. That strategy does not involve Congress adjusting, amending, or extending that ratification deadline, but urges states to ignore it altogether. When the Senate vote took place in the mid-to-late afternoon in Washington D.C., it was still midday in Hawaii. 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