Those simple 24 words constitute the Equal Rights Amendment that women have fought to ratify for a century since the suffragettes first proposed it. They would make a tremendous difference in the lives of millions of women throughout the United States. And today, given the striking down of Roe v. Wade, the ERA is more important than ever.
It's no surprise that the current make-up of the Republican Party fights the ERA tooth and nail; the ERA would hamper their anti-choice and anti-equality agenda. But, shockingly, the Biden Administration is fighting it too.
How can this be? Biden does publicly support the ERA and has called on Congress to ratify it, but behind the scenes, Biden’s Department of Justice is fighting the ERA in court and Biden is refusing to use his own ability to ratify it.
Enough states have ratified the amendment, but because of an arbitrary deadline that many legal scholars argue can be bypassed, the Trump Administration was able to refuse to verify the ratification. The Biden Administration has continued the Trump Administration’s position, refusing to verify the amendment even as activists across the country as well as Democratic senators and representatives have called on it to do so, and continuing to fight in court cases against those who argue the ERA is ratified.
This is another example of the Biden Administration claiming to care about protecting abortion rights and equality while doing little to fight back against the Republican assault.
A Marianne Williamson administration would reverse the Biden-Trump position, and, heeding legal scholars who say the ERA is already ratified and can be verified by the executive, I would verify the ERA on day one of my presidency. I would call the archivist and simply tell her to publish.
