On Feb.28, 2023, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia affirmed the dismissal by the lower court in the case, State of Illinois and State of Nevada v David Ferriero, USCA-DC Dkt. No. 21-5096 – one in which America’s Future had filed an Amicus brief applauding the lower court’s dismissal and urging the Appeals Court to do likewise. Generally, the two states filed the suit to compel the Archivist of the United States to certify and publish the 1972 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as an Amendment to the Constitution. To read the USCA-DC decision, click here. To read America’s Future brief, click here.
The District Court dismissed the lawsuit for lack of jurisdictions, explaining:
(1) The plaintiffs had not suffered any particular injury, and therefore could not demonstrate a clear and indisputable right to relief – a required element of a civil lawsuit. In the District Court’s words, the plaintiffs failed to establish any existence of “a concrete injury that could be remedied by ordering [the Archivist] to act;” and
(2) The plaintiffs failed to establish that the Archivist had a clear duty to certify and publish the ERA which had not been duly ratified. Keeping in mind that, at no time, during the seven-year ratification period starting in 1972 (when Congress voted to pass it) and ending in 1981 (the deadline for three-fourths of the states to ratify it), the Court reasoned that the Archivist was under no clear duty to act because the legal validity of the ERA as an Amendment to our Constitution was not certain. The plaintiffs argued that the seven-year ratification deadline had no legal relevance to the Archivist’s certification and publication duties.
The fatally flawed arguments advanced by the plaintiffs did not persuade the Court and, accordingly, the DC Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s dismissal.
However, next week the US Senate is scheduled to hold a hearing on renewing the ERA and all its flaws. They are set to debate a resolution that would extend the original ratification deadline of the ERA from seven years to over 50 years in order to enshrine their “gender-identity” ideologies into the Constitution, devolving and ravaging all the strides the women’s movement has made over many years. The reason the Left needs a deadline extension instead of reworking the legislation into a new bill is to grandfather in states that ratified the ERA back in the 1970s.
The Leftists are steadfast in their philosophy that men and women should share bathrooms, locker rooms, and even prison cells. The ERA was then and still is today, all about weaving their radical and unnerving social agenda into our lives without regard to the physical dangers or other irreparable harms that spring out of ideas like gender-neutral sports teams and same-sex homeless or domestic-violence shelters.
For whatever crazy reason, progressives are determined to dismantle all obstacles that restrict perverts from infiltrating spaces constructed for women’s comfort and safety. Unquestionably their reckless ideas, if implemented, will directly lead to a rise in the incidences of acts of violence against women, including sexual assault and rape.
We, at America’s Future, applaud the Court of Appeals for a sound decision upholding the dismissal. As for next week’s Senate hearing, we hope reasonableness and common sense prevail in Congress and the Leftists’ designs to fundamentally transform and, therefore, destroy this country are kicked to the curb once again.
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