Dem
51
GOP
49
Yesterday, the Senate held a vote on adding the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. We have written about this general subject multiple times before, but as a reminder, the current status of the ERA goes like this. The Amendment has reached the necessary threshold for approval, with Virginia signing on as the 38th state about 5 years ago. However, there are two problems. The first us that the enabling legislation had a deadline of 1982. The second is that several states have tried to rescind their approval.
Yesterday's vote was on the first question. The Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel recently issued an opinion that says Congress can lift that deadline, if it votes to do so. This would take a two-thirds majority in each chamber (although no presidential signature would be needed). Should those two-thirds majorities be secured, then the ERA would theoretically become official. That would still leave the matter of the states that rescinded (Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Tennessee), but they would presumably have to file suit (which they might or might not do) and then persuade the Supreme Court that it's legal to rescind an approval.
In any case, it's all academic, because there's zero chance that two-thirds of either chamber will vote to lift the 1982 deadline. Yesterday's vote in the Senate was 51-47, with the vote breaking along party lines, excepting that Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) voted for the measure and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) switched his final vote to "nay" so that he might retain the right to bring the measure up again.
Schumer, of course, can count, and he knows that 51 or 52 is far less than 67. Yesterday's vote, then, was just a show vote. The plan for 2024 is to paint the Republican Party as the anti-woman party, opposing abortion access and opposing equal rights. If the GOP ends up with a presidential nominee who has been found to be liable for having raped a woman, then it becomes all the easier to make this case. We are advised that about half the electorate is female, so this might just be a winning strategy. (Z)