The U.S. House on Thursday took a shot at time travel, with a simple majority adoption of a resolution that would go back in time and remove a long-passed deadline for states to approve the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
It was House Joint Resolution 79 that Democrats, and a handful of Republicans, adopted, and it claims to "remove" a deadline that was contained in the Proposing Clause of the ERA when it was approved in 1972.
"The House Democratic Leadership put on a partisan political stage-magic show – the 40-years-dead ERA was used as a prop," explained Douglas D. Johnson, senior policy adviser for National Right to Life.
"Efforts to resuscitate the 1972 ERA are likely to encounter insurmountable obstacles in the federal courts – and also, given the now widely admitted connection to abortion, in the U.S. Senate."
It was a Democrat majority in the Virginia legislature that recently adopted the amendment, and they claimed to be the 38th state to do so, to make the ERA part of the Constitution.
But the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel said recently that's nonsense because, "Congress has constitutional authority to impose a deadline for ratifying a proposed constitutional amendment. It exercised this authority when proposing the Equal Rights Amendment and, because three-fourths of the state legislatures did not ratify before the deadline that Congress imposed, the Equal Rights Amendment has failed adoption and is no longer pending before the states."
It continued, "Accordingly, even if one or more state legislatures were to ratify the proposed amendment it would not become part of the Constitution and the archivist could not certify its adoption."
The opinion said Congress "may not revive a proposed amendment after a deadline for its ratification has expired. Should Congress wish to propose the amendment anew, it may do so through the same procedures required to propose an amendment in the first instance, consistent with Article V of the Constitution."
The concept first was proposed in the U.S. House in 1923, but it didn't gain congressional action until the 1970s. But that legislation included a ratification deadline, which was extended once but that action happened before the time had expired.
Recently, three states sued to keep the ERA corpse in its grave.
AP reported South Dakota, Louisiana and Alabama have filed a federal case to block the ERA should there be support.
The lawsuits seeks to prevent the U.S. archivist, David Ferriero, from accepting a new ratification from a state.
South Dakota's attorney general, Jason Raynsborg, explained: "The South Dakota Legislature ratified the ERA in 1973, but in 1979 passed Senate Joint Resolution 2 which required the ERA be ratified in the original time limit set by Congress or be rescinded. Because thirty-eight states failed to ratify the amendment by [the deadline], the South Dakota Legislature rescinded its ratification of the ERA."
He said it's an issue "of following the rule of law, the rules that our Founding Fathers put into place to protect us from government making decisions without the consent or support of 'we the people.'"
The Right to Life group pointed out when the plan originally came to the House, it was supported by 94%. In 1983 a revival attempt got only 65% support. On Thursday, it was just 56%.
"Today's tally was 45 votes short of the two-thirds margin that Article V of the Constitution requires for constitutional amendment proposals, although the Democratic House leadership today ignored that requirement," the organization said.
The group cited far-left Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a longtime supporter of the ERA, who has concluded that the original idea is dead, and she'd like to see a "new beginning."
She pointed out that if the states that approved the ERA past the deadline are counted, then those states that rescinded their approval also would have to be counted, and the plan still would fall short of requirements.
Before the long-ago deadline, 35 states approved. In recent years, two more did that, and then this year Virginia voted.
But ratification votes by Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho, Kentucky and South Dakota all have been reversed.
U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., said Democrats were trying "to retroactively revive this failed … amendment. Congress does not have the power to do that."
"If you support the language of the 1972 ERA, you only have one constitutional option, and that’s to start the whole process over again and make your case to current voters nationwide," he advised Democrats. "You have to obtain the required two-thirds vote in each house of Congress, and then win ratification individually from 38 states. That is not likely to happen because it’s now well understood that the language used in the ERA would prevent state voters from enacting any limits on abortion up to the moment of birth."
The vote Thursday was 232-183. Besides all the other obstacles, it faces major opposition in the U.S. Senate.