Sorry, Slate, the ERA is dead

Susan Matthews and Mark Joseph Stern write in Slate that “there are obvious reasons to be frustrated by conservative efforts to scorn ERA revival as a brazenly unconstitutional joke.” But that’s exactly what the revival is. …

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While they claim that “reasonable people can disagree about whether there’s a lawful path forward for the amendment right now,” their hearts aren’t in that proposition enough even to outline what a reasonable case for having the national archivist amend the Constitution would look like.

Instead they make two points that don’t amount to such a case: The Article V process for amending the Constitution has been stretched before, and there is precedent for ignoring the decisions of five states that rescinded their ratifications. The first point does not justify pretending that Congress put no time limit into its resolution proposing the amendment. And that’s the basic problem, not the five rescindments. Note that the article they link in labeling conservative arguments about the amendment “frustrating,” which is by me, was agnostic about whether states can rescind their ratifications.

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