ERA may get another chance
Speier leading fight to revive amendment
WASHINGTON — Nearly four decades after opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment declared the effort dead, House Democrats led by San Mateo Rep. Jackie Speier will vote Thursday to revive the fight.
The House will take up Speier’s bill to remove Congress’ 1982 deadline for states’ ratification of the constitutional amendment guaranteeing “equality of rights under the law,” regardless of sex. ERA approval stalled at 35 states before the deadline, three short of the threefourths of the states that the amendment needed.
Then, in 2017, the Nevada Legislature voted to ratify the ERA, followed the next year by Illinois. Last month, lawmakers in Virginia voted for the amendment, giving it the needed 38 states — perhaps.
The Trump administration’s Justice Department has effectively prevented the amendment from becoming law by directing the national archivist, the librarian who records new amendments, from certifying its passage. The department argues that the Constitution doesn’t give Congress authority to revive an amendment after its deadline has lapsed.
Speier says her plan would negate the archivist’s dilemma. Her bill, HJR79, would erase any mention of a deadline for ratification.
“It’s just a huge gaffe in our Constitution, and we need to fix it,” Speier told The Chron
icle. “I do not want my daughter and, hopefully someday, my granddaughter, to still be arguing about this and still be fighting for equality.”
Congress sent the measure to the states in 1972, and at first it encountered little opposition. Then conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly began organizing a campaign against it, arguing that it could eliminate protections for women in childcustody and alimony cases and even lead to women being subject to the military draft. Congress extended its original deadline for ratification from 1979 to 1982, but proponents still fell short.
If Speier’s bill clears Congress, the ERA could take effect in two years. But its expected passage by the Democraticrun House is one thing — conservatives still oppose it, and they’ll be in control when the bill goes to the Republicandominated Senate.
The bill wouldn’t require President Trump’s signature, according to Speier’s office.
Opponents of the ERA say the amendment is unnecessary because federal law already prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. They say the effort is really an attempt to curtail state laws that restrict access to abortions.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, RKy., was asked by reporters last week about the ERA revival effort. “I haven’t thought” about whether to allow a Senate vote on the issue, he said.
“Personally, I’m not a supporter,” McConnell added.
Supporters say arguments against the law are baseless because women already have the right to abortions. They say complaints that the law is unnecessary ignore that women still earn less than men on average, and that sexbased cases of discrimination face a less rigorous legal test than other types of bias.
ERA supporters are hopeful that all 47 senators in the Democratic Caucus will support it and that four Republicans can be persuaded to give it a majority. Two Republicans, Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, are cosponsoring the Senate legislation.
“We are closer than we’ve ever been,” said Carol Jenkins, copresident of the ERA Coalition. “We are now in the courts, and we will prevail.”
Several states have sued the federal archivist, seeking a court order that the ERA be allowed to take effect. But courts have historically given Congress the power to set its own deadlines for adopting amendments, a role the Constitution doesn’t outline.
Proponents of the ERA say Speier’s bill would prepare for the likely outcome of the court fight — a judicial decision to send the issue to Congress.
There’s one other complication that would probably end up in court: Five of the states that ratified the amendment before 1982 have sought to rescind their approval. Proponents argue there’s nothing in the Constitution allowing them to do so.
For Speier, Thursday’s vote is the culmination of decades of work on ERArelated legislation. She proposed similar bills for the past six years, an effort that received little attention until Virginia’s ratification.
“She’s also been dedicated to the ERA before it was cool,” said Kate Kelly, an attorney for Equality Now, a national advocacy group. “In that way, she has been a visionary on the issue.”
Speier first worked on the ERA in 1978, when she was an aide to the late Peninsula Rep. Leo Ryan. She said she watched from the House gallery as Ryan, who had been undecided on the issue, voted to extend the deadline to 1982.
“I was sitting there thinking, ‘If he doesn’t vote for this, I’m going to have to resign,’ ” Speier said. “But he actually voted for it, and then I kept my job.”
Speier revived her fight for the ERA after she was elected to Congress in 2008, filling the seat once held by her former boss.
At Trump’s State of the Union speech last week, Speier passed out green “ERA Yes” pins to Democratic women, who wore white to symbolize their connection to suffragists who fought for the right to vote around the turn of the 20th century.
Hanging in Speier’s Capitol Hill office are two framed copies of letters from that era, which she said help explain why the ERA is an issue a full century after suffragist Alice Paul first proposed a threeline act banning discrimination “on account of sex.”
One letter, written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other suffragists in 1871, urged Congress to recognize women’s right to vote “under the present federal Constitution.”
Below it, a letter from the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, written to Congress in 1917, declared that allowing women to vote “would be an official endorsement of nagging as a national policy.”
Speier said while the fight for suffrage is long over, the sentiment expressed in that second letter is still relevant in the fight for ERA ratification.
“I have that here to show young people,” Speier said. “It shows you why we are still fighting for fundamental rights in this country, because there is a segment, and frankly it’s a very small segment, that fears women having equal rights.”