After laying dormant for years, the Equal Rights Amendment may finally be validated if the Senate approves removing a 1982 ratification deadline this week.
"In this ominous hour of American history, the Equal Rights Amendment has never been as necessary and urgent as it is today," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement Monday. "Recent events like the Supreme Court's horrible Dobbs decision, uncertainty with critical care drugs like Mifepristone, and a slew of proposed state actions have women in this country facing an uncertain future.
"We are here to stand united, and inch by inch restore, fight for, and expand women's rights so that the women of today and the generations of tomorrow will not know a future with less access than their mothers had.
"The ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment would finally provide a constitutional remedy against sex discrimination — pushing our country one step closer to finally achieving equal justice under the law. It has been exactly 100 years since the first ERA was proposed in Congress. American women cannot afford to wait 100 more."
The proposed constitutional amendment was first introduced in 1923 guaranteeing equal rights to women under the law, but it did not pass both chambers of Congress until 1972.
As the law circulated to gain the 38 states needed to become a formal amendment to the Constitution, Congress imposed a deadline of 1982 to pass it.
It was not until 2020, however, that Virginia became the 38th state to agree to ratify the amendment, 38 years after the deadline passed, according to the Democrats.
This week's vote would remove the deadline and allow the amendment to become a "valid" part of the Constitution.
According to the Washington Post, 35 states had ratified the amendment at the time of the 1982 deadline, sending it into limbo until it was revived in 2017 with successful ratification efforts in Nevada, and then in Illinois in 2018, with Virginia finally coming on board in 2020.
The report said that the courts have dismissed the revitalized efforts to ratify the amendment because it came long after the deadline passed, sending the amendment process back to the beginning.
"The States have not clearly and indisputably shown that the Archivist had a duty to certify and publish the ERA or that Congress lacked the authority to place a time limit in the proposing clause of the ERA," an opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit stated.
Despite that opinion, President Joe Biden said in 2022 that Congress could recognize the ratification and put the amendment officially in place, the Post report said.
"I am calling on Congress to act immediately to pass a resolution recognizing ratification of the ERA," The Post reported Biden saying when the House announced a resolution to advance the ERA. "As the recently published Office of Legal Counsel memorandum makes clear, there is nothing standing in Congress's way from doing so."
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.