The ABA Is Wrong on the ERA
9th August 2024
The American Bar Association first endorsed adding the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution in 1972, the year that Congress proposed and sent it to the states for ratification.
At its Aug. 6 annual convention, the ABA went further and now claims that the 1972 ERA is already part of the Constitution. The ABA is dead wrong.
Congress proposed the ERA in March 1972 with a seven-year ratification deadline. With that deadline looming, and fewer than the necessary 38 states ratifying, Congress passed a controversial resolution in 1978 purporting to extend the deadline by 39 months. No additional states ratified the 1972 ERA and five that already had subsequently withdrew their support. As the Congressional Research Service has repeatedly observed, the 1972 ERA “formally died on June 30, 1982.”
Because Congress will likely never propose another one, supporters are desperate to maintain the fiction that the 1972 ERA is, as Miracle Max would say, “only mostly dead” rather than “all dead.” It remained pending before the states, and available for ratification, because Congress did not put the deadline in the right place in its proposing resolution. Or so they contend.