footnotes.¹

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), is the proposed 28th amendment to the Constitution that would guarantee equal rights to all people regardless of sex. The ERA was first proposed more than a century ago and finally passed the threshold for ratification in 2020 when Virginia became the 38th state to ratify. When President Trump took office in 2017, ERA supporters expressed concern that the incoming administration’s priorities—conservative judicial appointments, skeptical attitudes toward new constitutional amendments, a desire to roll back certain equality measures, and the refusal to acknowledge ratification beyond the original deadline—would slow or even prevent the ERA’s long-awaited addition to the U.S. Constitution. Recently there have been calls from organizations like Indivisible.org for President Biden to instruct the National Archivist to publish and certify the ERA before he leaves office in January 2025. Certification of the ERA by the Archivist now would both guarantee equa...