House Approves Resolution Removing The Deadline For Ratifying The Equal Rights Amendment; Reauthorizes The Violence Against Women Act

The Hill reports, House removes deadline for ratifying ERA:

The House on Wednesday adopted H.J.Res 17, a resolution to remove the deadline for ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to formally ban discrimination on the basis of sex as one of Democrats’ top legislative priorities.

Lawmakers passed the resolution largely along party lines, 222-204, to send it to the Senate. Four Republicans joined with all Democrats in support of the measure. [Reps. Curtis, Fitzpatrick, Malliotakis, Reed].

Arizona Congressional Delegation: Yeah: Gallego, Grijalva, Kirkpatrick, O’Halleran, Stanton; Nay: Biggs, Gosar, Lesko, Schweikert.

The vote comes after [U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras in Washington, D.C.] ruled earlier this month that three states’ recent ratifications of the ERA came too late to ensure its addition to the Constitution. Judge rules states were too late in ratifying Equal Rights Amendment.

The judge’s ruling earlier this month followed a similar opinion from Wiliam Barr’s Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel last year that the ERA is no longer pending before the states and can’t be ratified because its deadline expired.

When asked about the legal counsel’s opinion, Attorney General Merrick Garland said in written answers to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation process that “any opinions or legal advice I might give on this subject would be based solely on the law, and not on any other consideration.”

For what it’s worth, the House had a Constitutional Authority Statement that “Congress has the power to enact this legislation pursuant to the following: Article V of the United States Constitution.” Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 12, Page H227 (Thursday, January 21, 2021).

States were granted a seven-year deadline in 1972 to ratify the ERA, which was later extended to 1982. But only 35 states had ratified the ERA by then, falling short of the three-fourths needed to successfully amend the Constitution.

Virginia became the 38th state last year to ratify the ERA and clinch the three-fourths threshold, following votes by Nevada and Illinois since 2017 — albeit more than 40 years after Congress first endorsed the proposed amendment.

Proponents argue that Congress should act to remove the original deadline from decades ago so the ERA can still be ratified.

“[Former Supreme Court Justice] Antonin Scalia, the great jurist, said once, does the Constitution require discrimination based on sex? The answer is no. But if the question is, does the Constitution prohibit discrimination based on sex? The answer is also no. That should send a chilling feeling in each of us that in the Constitution of the United States, women are not protected,” Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), the sponsor of the resolution, said during House floor debate.

“There can be no expiration date on equality,” Speier said.

The House passed a similar resolution last year to remove the ERA’s ratification deadline, but it was ignored by the Senate, which was controlled by the “Grim Reaper” of the Senate graveyard, Mitch McConnell, where bills go to die.

The House is also expected to pass legislation later Wednesday to renew the Violence Against Women Act, another bill that the Senate didn’t take up in the previous session of Congress.

House Democratic women made a point of wearing white, the traditional color of suffragettes, during Wednesday’s proceedings to mark the occasion.

House Democrats are sending the measures back over to the upper chamber now that their party controls both chambers of Congress, among many bills central to their legislative agenda that never got Senate action under Republicans.

Even so, the ERA resolution and other bills that rank among Democrats’ top priorities still might not become law due to the Senate filibuster requiring 60 votes in the evenly divided chamber.

Kill the anti-democratic filibuster!

Yahoo!News adds, House votes to revive Equal Rights Amendment for women despite legal questions:

During the Trump administration, the Justice Department said Congress can’t revive the proposed amendment; it can only restart the ratification process.

“We conclude that Congress had the constitutional authority to impose a deadline on the ratification of the ERA and, because that deadline has expired, the ERA Resolution is no longer pending before the States,” the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote.

Asked if Biden will rescind that opinion, an administration official said Biden won’t dictate an outcome. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. The White House did not issue a “statement of administration policy” on the ERA resolution as it did on another bill debated Wednesday that would revive a law aimed at reducing domestic and sexual violence.

Speier told USA TODAY on Wednesday she is confident the Justice Department’s 2020 opinion will be withdrawn.

“If you talk to any constitutional scholar, they said the opinion that was offered by the Justice Department last year was laughable, that it could not hold water in any real serious court of law,” she said. “That was a political statement.”

The measure is supported by two GOP senators, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Maine’s Susan Collins. But it doesn’t have enough Republican support to avoid a Senate filibuster.

“I wish that I could tell you that we had more Republican support for that at this point in time,” Murkowski said Tuesday. “We continue to work that.”

If adopted, the Constitution would state that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

Supporters say it’s a long-needed protection for women who face discrimination in the workplace and struggle against domestic violence and sexual harassment.

Though many federal, state and local laws prohibit discrimination, those can be changed much more easily than a constitutional amendment. Courts treat sex discrimination cases inconsistently, advocates say.

“We have the right to demand that we be put in the Constitution,” Speier said. “We want in.”

Nothing Has Changed Since Phyllis Schlafly In The 1970’s – Opposition Is Always About Abortion

Opponents argue it’s an unnecessary amendment that would enshrine in the Constitution protections for abortion, voiding any federal or state restrictions. Anti-abortion groups have pointed to court decisions in Connecticut and New Mexico that used state-approved equal rights amendments to allow “medically necessary” abortions for women on public assistance.

“Men and women are already equal under the Constitution. This legislation would make us no more equal,” Rep. Michelle Fischbach, R-Minn., said during floor debate. “It is merely a vehicle for the far-left, special interest groups to use to enact their pro-abortion agenda.”

* * *

Ratification efforts began anew in 2017 when women took to the streets in protests following President Donald Trump’s election.

Nevada became the 36th state to ratify the amendment that year, followed by Illinois in 2018.

Virginia approved it last year, the first time that a proposed constitutional amendment was adopted by the required number of states after a deadline under the premise that it could still be ratified.

Those states unsuccessfully argued in court that the deadline is not enforceable because the Constitution doesn’t give Congress the power to impose one. They also argued that while the deadline was included in the introductory clause to the amendment, it was not in the amendment’s text that states approved.

U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Barack Obama, ruled against the states on March 5.

“The Court will not pull the rug out from under Congress’s long-accepted practice of declaring ratification conditions in a proposing resolution’s preamble based on a technicality,” Contreras wrote.

The states could appeal the decision.

The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was a longtime supporter of the ERA, said last year that she would like the process to “start over” because of the controversy over the late ratifications.

She also noted that some states that backed the ERA have since rescinded approval, raising another legal question. Five states – South Dakota, Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho and Kentucky – voted to withdraw in the 1970s.

“If you count a latecomer on the plus side,” Ginsburg said during an appearance at Georgetown University Law Center, “how can you disregard states that said ‘We’ve changed our minds?'”

As a matter of fact, a bill to begin the Equal Rights Amendment anew has been filed on Congress, H.J.Res. 28, sponsored by Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY). The bill has 97 cosponsors.

UPDATE: The House also voted to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, which expired in 2019, by a vote of 244-172, with 29 Republicans voting in favor.

Arizona Congressional Delegation: Yeah: Gallego, Grijalva, Kirkpatrick, O’Halleran, Stanton; Nay: Biggs, Gosar, Lesko, Schweikert.

The original measure — which was aimed at helping to stop domestic abuse, violence and sexual harassment against women and girls and at providing resources to victims and survivors — was championed by Joe Biden when he was in the Senate.

The Washington Post reports, House votes to reauthorize landmark Violence Against Women Act:

The House voted on Wednesday to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, legislation originally authored by then-Sen. Joe Biden in 1994 that aims to strengthen protections for women from domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking.

The landmark law was reauthorized several times since, but lapsed in 2019 after the Democratic-controlled House voted to renew it, but it stalled in the Republican-led Senate. Democrats are hopeful it will find the support this time although the latest version still faces potential obstacles in the evenly-divided Senate.

The vote was 244-to-172, with 29 Republicans breaking ranks and joining Democrats in backing the reauthorization.

“We want women to live. We want victims of violence to live, men or women. We want children to be able to have a parent,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.), at an earlier news conference with House Democrats where all the women wore white in honor of women’s suffrage.

Republican opposition to the bill revolves in part around closing the so-called “boyfriend loophole,” which adds dating partners and stalkers to the provision banning spouses of convicted domestic violence or abuse from owning firearms.

The National Rifle Association is opposed to the extending the ban, and Republicans have opposed the broader VAWA legislation over it, arguing that it is a ploy by Democrats to erode Second Amendment rights.

So Republicans are good with violent men killing their girlfriends because of their gun fetish and gun worship? This is morally bankrupt.

The bill also expands protections for Native American, transgender and immigrant women. Some Republicans voiced opposition to adding transgender women to the law.

November 2020: A record number of transgender and gender nonconforming people in the US have been killed in 2020: at least 37 trans and gender nonconforming people have been killed this year in what the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) called “an epidemic of violence.” “This grim milestone proves what we have long known: this violence is an epidemic,” HRC wrote in its annual report.

“The most egregious provisions of this bill push leftist gender ideology at the expense of important protections for women’s privacy and security,” said Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.), who specifically referenced a requirement that women’s shelters take in transgender women.

So Debbie Lesko is good with killing transgenders out of fear and ignorance? We already knew that she is morally bankrupt.

Maybe she should open her self-professed “Christian” heart and listen to this Christian father of a transgender daughter, Brandon Boulware, testify to Missouri lawmakers to stop discriminating against trans youth in a hearing about trans youth athlete ban HJR 53.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) accused Republicans of supporting protecting women unless they “happen to be Native American or an LGBTQ woman or an immigrant women.”

Democrats have blamed Republicans for failing to pass what has historically been an overwhelmingly bipartisan reauthorization. The last time the bill was reauthorized in 2013, 23 Republicans in the Senate and 87 Republicans in the GOP-controlled House voted for it.

“They apparently took the position that violence against women is not important enough for us to take up,” Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said Wednesday. “This is a pandemic in America. It is a lethal pandemic in America. It is a psychological trauma in America.”

The VAWA vote also came less than 24 hours after a gunman in Atlanta killed eight people, six Asian American women, though the motive of that crime is still unknown.

“This crime has elements that we are trying to address here in Congress, gun violence, violence against women and the meteoric rise of violence we are witnessing against the (Asian American Pacific Islander) community,” Rep. Marilyn Strickland (D-Wash.) said during the floor debate. “As a woman who is Black and Korean, I’m acutely aware how it feels to be erased or ignored and how the default position when violence is committed against women of color or women is to defer from confronting the hate that is often the motivation.

The White House issued a statement this week supporting the bill, saying, “VAWA reauthorization is more urgent now than ever, especially when the pandemic and economic crisis have only further increased the risks of abuse and the barriers to safety for women in the United States.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the law was “one of the president’s proudest accomplishments.”

Biden, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, led the effort in 1994 for federal recognition of the violence perpetrated on women and to provide them legal protections.

“The term VAWA has become synonymous with justice‚” Pelosi said.