'Have you heard the news?'

 by Scott Johnson

Someone inside the White House is determined to humiliate “President Biden” even further on his way out the door. Whoever that may be has now engineered “Biden’s” announcement that the Equal Rights Amendment is the law of the land.

I kid you not. I would think we are being pranked, but NPR and others say it’s so. It must be so.

Vice President Harris appears to take “Biden’s” declaration at face value in her statement posted on the White House site (“it is the law of the land because the American people have spoken in states across our nation”). She has no excuse. She is responsible for her own embarrassment.

A community note appended to “Biden’s” post on X injects a note of reality. The ERA had a seven-year deadline for ratification that was extended from 1979 to 1982. Only 35 states had ratified the amendment before the extended deadline for ratification expired in 1982. Purported post-deadline ratification pushed the number to 38, but five states acted to rescind their prior approval in the meantime. We don’t need to reach the question whether the rescissions are effectual because the amendment failed. See the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel opinion flagged here and posted here. The National Archives has made related records accessible in a post here.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/01/have-you-heard-the-news.php