Legal experts slammed President Biden’s announcement declaring the 28th Amendment law as “cynical and irrelevant.”Biden on Friday released a statement saying the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) should be considered ratified and a new addition to the U.S. Constitution. “It is long past time to recognize the will of the American people. In keeping with my oath and duty to the 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,” he said. BIDEN’S OFFICIAL X ACCOUNT DRAWS MOCKERY WITH REFERENCE TO CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT THAT DOESN’T EXIST”Biden’s announcement is both cynical and irrelevant,” said former Assistant U.S. attorney and Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy. “If he believed what he is saying, he would’ve said it when his administration started, not when he is on his way out the door as a failed, one-term president. “More importantly, the president has no constitutional role in the amendment process, so his view carries no weight.””President Biden seems intent on moving his administration from the odious to the absurd,” Jonathan Turley, Fox News contributor and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, told Fox News Digital. “This was an embarrassingly pandering moment to the most extreme elements in his party. It is a position based on a long-rejected and frankly ridiculous foundation.”When asked about the timing of the announcement by reporters, Biden said Friday, “Because I had to get all of the facts and I contacted every constitutional scholar in the world to make sure it was the right decision.”The ERA would prohibit discrimination based on gender. It was sent to the states for ratification in 1972, with Congress setting a 1979 deadline for three-quarters of state legislatures to ratify the amendment. The deadline was later extended to 1982. DANA PERINO KNOCKS BIDEN’S CONTROVERSIAL FAREWELL ADDRESSVirginia became the last state to pass the amendment in 2020, pushing the final number of states who had passed the amendment to a total of 38. McCarthy noted that the ERA “was not ratified by the states within the statutorily allotted timeframe.””The only way to get it into the Constitution would be to start all over again,” McCarthy said. “Everybody knows this, including Biden. That is why the national archivist has not published it, nor has Biden had the temerity to try to order that that be done.”Turley also said: “Biden notably stopped short of giving the left what it wanted most: an actual executive order on the ratification. He simply made a declaration and presumably left the matter up to the archivist.”ERA: WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENTThe national archivist is responsible for making constitutional amendments official. The archivist had previously declined to certify the amendment, citing a 2020 opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel of the DOJ (OLC) that “affirmed that the ratification deadline established by Congress for the ERA is valid and enforceable.””The OLC concluded that extending or removing the deadline requires new action by Congress or the courts. Court decisions at both the District and Circuit levels have affirmed that the ratification deadlines established by Congress for the ERA are valid,” the National Archives said in a statement in December. “Therefore, the Archivist of the United States cannot legally publish the Equal Rights Amendment. As the leaders of the National Archives, we will abide by these legal precedents and support the constitutional framework in which we operate.””This is just pandering,” McCarthy said. “It will have no lasting significance.”
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Publish date : 2025-01-17 22:17:12
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Biden’s last-minute constitutional change slammed by legal experts: ‘Cynical and irrelevant’
