WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — In a last-minute overture to the abortion lobby, outgoing President Joe Biden declared on Friday that the so-called Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution is the law of the land, although his opinion has no legal force and contradicts the official legal assessment of his own administration.
Originally proposed and defeated decades ago, the ERA states 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.” But many argue that if implemented, this seemingly simple yet redundant language would be interpreted as codifying into law non-rights such as abortion and have broad ramifications on everything from the military draft and sex-segregated prisons to women-only restrooms and male-only clergy, by giving judges and agencies new language to read new meanings and intentions into.
Although it originally failed according to the the rules for amending the Constitution, Democrats and pro-abortion activists have long claimed that later state votes affirming it should count toward its ratification, despite ratification deadlines having long since expired.
In a Friday White House press release, Biden declared that because Virginia “became the 38th state to ratify” the ERA in 2020, it “has cleared all necessary hurdles to be formally added to the Constitution as the 28th Amendment.” Biden cited the left-wing American Bar Association (ABA) as agreeing with him.
“It is long past time to recognize the will of the American people,” Biden said. “In keeping with my oath and duty to Constitution and country, 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.”
However, many legal authorities argue the opposite, including the late left-wing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who, despite personally supporting the ERA, admitted in 2020 that “a number of states have withdrawn their ratification. So if you count a latecomer on the plus side, how can you disregard states that said ‘we’ve changed our minds’?”
As explained by Florida International University law professor Elizabeth Price Foley, the time of the deadline in 1979, only 35 of the necessary 38 states had ratified the ERA, though the year before Congress “purported to ‘extend’ the ERA’s ratification deadline by approximately three years,” during which “no additional states” ratified it and South Dakota actually voted to declare its original decision to ratify “null and void” in protest of the deadline extension, which the state saw as Congress attempting “unilaterally to alter the terms and conditions in such a way as to materially affect the congressionally established time period for ratification,” creating the “perpetual possibility of a sudden change in the Constitution of the United States due to a shift of opinion in a small number of states.”
Since 2017, three additional states (Illinois, Nevada, and Virginia) have voted to ratify the ERA, which supporters claim makes it part of the Constitution. But once Congress sets a deadline, “the deadline is judicially enforceable and cannot be altered by future Congresses,” she added. “If Congress wishes to extend the time for ratification, therefore, it must begin the Article V process anew, proposing a new constitutional amendment, with or without a ratification deadline.”
In December 2024, Archivist of the United States Dr. Colleen Shogan and Deputy Archivist William J. Bosanko issued a statement that the ERA “cannot be certified as part of the Constitution due to established legal, judicial, and procedural decisions,” noting that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) under both the Trump and Biden administrations agreed that the original deadline “was valid and enforceable.”