Rep. Lisa Campbell announced on Jan. 28 that she had signed on as a co-sponsor of a House Resolution which would publish the Equal Rights Amendment as the 28th amendment to the United States Constitution.
In the past week, Rep. Lisa Campbell, who represents Kennesaw and Acworth in the Georgia House of Representatives, joined four other representatives as a cosponsor of House Resolution 8. As a freshman representative and the first woman to represent District 35, this resolution marks her first legislative act. By signing on, she has said that she has fulfilled a lifelong dream, according to her Instagram post.
There are legal questions currently lingering about whether the President could publish the Equal Rights Amendment as the 28th amendment. Although it has now reached the required threshold of ratification by 38 states, this was not accomplished before the 1982 deadline set by congress, according to CNN. This has led to questioning of whether the amendment could be published, as well as whether Congress would have to undertake the process of passing the amendment again, as well as sending it to the states to be ratified once more.
When asked about the legality of publishing the amendment, Elizabeth Gordon, professor of public law in the School of Government Affairs at KSU stated that the answer is still unclear.
“The Constitution doesn’t mention deadlines for ratification. And the deadlines in the ERA situation were not in the amendment’s text, hence they were not ratified by the states,” Gordon said.
The bill’s five cosponsors are all Democrats, which Gordon says may make it more difficult to pass with the requirement that Republicans sign on.
“While some Georgia Republicans supported an ERA ratification proposal a few years ago, there are probably not enough willing to join the Dems [Democrats] in the General Assembly,” Gordon said.
However, the impact of adding the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution would impact civil case law according to Gordon.
“Courts would view laws discriminating on the basis of sex more like they currently view racial discrimination under the 14th Amendment,” Gordon said. “This higher standard is called strict scrutiny. Substantive issues that might be affected include all manner of reproductive rights issues, domestic violence policies, sexual assault prosecutions, pay equity issues, to name a few. Aside from short-term effects, the bigger deal is the permanence of a constitutional provision.”
The history of the Equal Rights Amendment goes back to the 75th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention in 1923, where it was first drafted, according to the Alice Paul Institute.
The amendment, simple in language, contained only forty words when Congress passed it in 1972: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
Well-written!
Thank you for bringing up the work *still* being done to pass an Amendment securing equal rights. I think we forget this was never ratified.
Compelling interview of an interesting woman!