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Reader: Did former President Joe Biden issue a statement saying that he thought the Equal Rights Amendment should be considered part of the Constitution?
FactCheck.org Director Lori Robertson: Yes. We answered this question last week in a feature we call Ask FactCheck. Our short answer: "On his last full day in office, Biden published a statement supporting the ERA, but it has no legal effect."
Staff writer Saranac Hale Spencer goes into detail in our full answer about what Biden's statement means and the history of the ERA.
Sara wrote:
In his Jan. 17 statement, Biden said, “I affirm what I believe and what three-fourths of the states have ratified: the 28th Amendment is the law of the land, guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law regardless of their sex.” ...
It’s easy to think that the statement — which says, “I agree with the [American Bar Association] and with leading legal constitutional scholars that the Equal Rights Amendment has become part of our Constitution” — could mean that some action would be taken to establish the amendment as part of the Constitution. But the president doesn’t have the authority to do that.
In fact, Article V of the Constitution — which lays out the amendment process — doesn’t assign any role to the president, legal experts explained to us.
“While presidents have a lot of power, they’re conspicuously absent from Article V,” Wilfred Codrington, a professor at Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, told us in a phone interview.
Julie Suk, a professor at Fordham University’s School of Law who has written a book on the ERA, made the same point in an email to us. She also said, “Constitutional law experts have reasonable disagreements about whether or not the ERA’s unique and unprecedented ratification trajectory makes it a valid amendment under Article V.”
Read the full Ask FactCheck for more, “What Does Biden’s ERA Statement Mean?”
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