Equal Rights For Women? Is That Radical And Extreme? Only For Trump Republicans

Last month we mentioned that when the Virginia legislature, now controlled by the Democrats, passed ERA-- the Equal Rights Amendment-- Trump and his Republican enablers were still attempting to prevent it from being added to the Constitution. And that continues, of course. But yesterday, the House passed Jackie Speier's H.J. Resolution 79 removing the deadline for the ratification of the amendment.

Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, took to the floor to urge her colleagues to vote for the bill. Actually it was more like a celebratory statement, since she already knew the bill was going to pass. "What a glorious day this is! Today, the House will vote to remove the arbitrary deadline to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. With our vote today, and with Virginia’s historic vote to become the thirty-eighth and final state necessary to ratify the amendment, little girls, their moms and women across this country will know that yes, our Constitution can and will enshrine a ban on discrimination on the basis of sex. Equality of the sexes is not debatable. It has no expiration date. First proposed almost a century ago and passed by Congress in 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment would be a momentous step forward for women-- to end unequal pay, pregnancy discrimination and sexual harassment and exploitation. To women across the country who are watching today, let me just say: 'We see you and we stand with you' as we take this step toward equal rights."

Every single Democrat, even the worst Blue Dogs, voted for passage. And, of course almost all of the Republicans did as well. Almost. Five Republicans broke with Trump and McCarthy and crossed the aisle to vote with the Democrats. After all, half their constituents are women and they must have figured that out. The Republicans who voted in solidarity with women were John Curtis (UT), Rodney Davis (IL), Brian Fitzpatrick (PA), Tom Reed (NY) and Jeff Van Drew (NJ). The rest of the Republicans in the House-- or 182 of them anyway (+ ex-Republican Justin Amash)-- voted to continue waging the GOP war against women.

Audrey Denney is running for Congress in the northeast corner of California, a seat held by anti-equality Republican Doug LaMalfa. Audrey told us that she is "inspired by the women who have been unceasingly fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment for decades. Now that the ERA has passed the requisite number of states required to become law, we must continue to advocate for it to become a part of our Constitution and we must continue to fight to ensure that nobody is discriminated against based on their gender. This has been a bad week for Rep. LaMalfa’s record on defending women as he voted against enshrining the ERA in the Constitution and was one of only 37 Representatives to vote against the wildly bipartisan H.R.1980 which would have established a Smithsonian Museum of women’s history. Rep. LaMalfa claims to be 'one of us,' yet makes it clear from his votes that he doesn’t advocate for the women of our nation or California’s First District.

Liam O'Mara is also a California progressive running for Congress. His district, in Riverside County, is represented-- poorly-- by reactionary Republican Ken Calvert, who was arrested after being caught in a parked car with an underage, drugged-up prostitute (his pants down around his ankles)-- and then trying to flee from the police. Obviously, Calvert voted against the Equal Rights Amendment. Liam would have been proud to vote for it. "182 Republican legislators did not consider women worthy of equal citizenship (many do not consider women fully equal as humans, of course)," he told us after the vote. "One of those 'no' votes was Corrupt Ken Calvert, the Republican who has held CD-42 since 1993. Even half a century after the ERA was introduced, he still does not think women deserve legal equality. It is a sad fact of American life that in some ways a male corpse has more rights than a living woman, and the reason for this is 100% the Republican party. It remains beholden to the same sort of reactionary views on femininity which animated the fascist movement, and this anti-woman agenda is one more element of the GOP's steady drift into overt neofascism. Are women people? Do they deserve to be regarded as free and equal citizens? Vote to replace Calvert and the other 182 Republicans who disagree."

In southeast Missouri-- Limbaugh country-- the local congressman, Jason Smith, isn't someone anyone could possibly expect to either break with his party leadership or vote for women's equality. Cathy Ellis is the progressive Democrat taking him on. She told us that "Today is a proud day for the ERA and for women across this country. I have been a proud advocate for the ERA since I was young, and I am honored to see it finally move forward towards ratification. Unfortunately, my opponent does not feel this way. Jason Smith proudly voted no today, and he should truly be ashamed of himself. A vote against the ERA is a vote against women and equality. It’s time for a new leader in Missouri’s 8th that respects the rights of all people to have equal treatment under the law. It’s clear where Smith stands and who he works for. He doesn’t work for women, the LGBTQ+, our animals, our unions, or our families. All I can say is-- I’ll see him in November.”


Steve King isn't someone anyone would expect to stand up for women either. He's the only member of the Iowa congressional delegation to vote NO-- and J.D. Scholten wants to make sure it's the last time he votes against equality for women. "Today," said Scholten,"should have been one of Steve King’s easiest votes to cast: removing the arbitrary deadline to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and banning discrimination on the basis of sex. Unsurprisingly, King voted no. This is a slap in the face to the 380,000 women and girls in Iowa’s 4th district and millions more across this country. Plain and simple: Steve King does not value women. He sees them as vehicles for childbirth-- but to him, that’s the extent of their worth. King couldn’t be more wrong that women deserve full lived and legal equality under the law, and are critical to the success of our communities, government, culture, and economy."

You might think Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a fairly senior Republican woman, might speak up for the ERA. But then you'd be wrong. She voted NO today and her progressive opponent in the Spokane-centered district, Chris Armitage noticed. "This," he said, "is a continuation of Cathy's near three decade long crusade to ensure that women, the LGBT community, and marginalized communities are not protected from discrimination. Whether voting against the Equal Rights Amendment, Same Sex Marriage, or even something as simple as changing the word 'Oriental' to 'Asian' in WA State Documents, Cathy has remained reliably bigoted. Now she is one of Trump's most important fundraising chairs. This is a race she won by single digits in 2018 and as she runs for her 9th term, her pro-discrimination platform will lose her this Congressional seat."

Jon Hoadley's opponent, Fred Upton, tries painting himself as a moderate in a moderate district-- and then he gives in (always) to the slightest pressure from the extremists who run the GOP. Upton was a NO vote. State Rep Hoadley told us that Upton "turned his back on every single woman in Michigan and across the country. Upton's vote against allowing the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to move forward is completely inexcusable and downright shameful. Equality isn't partisan, it doesn't expire, and it's long past time that we ensure that women have equal rights, equal protections under the law, and equal pay in the workplace. It's time the women of Southwest Michigan have someone representing them who values them every bit as much as they value their male constituents-- in Congress, I'll always fight for equality."

Want to help replace LaMalfa, Calvert, Smith, King, McMorris Rodgers and Upton with men and women who believe in equality? That's why I included the 2020 Blue America congressional thermometer above.

Virginia Voted To Pass The ERA, But The Trump/Barr Justice Department Is Preventing It From Becoming The 28th Amendment To The Constitution

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution passed another milestone yesterday. Virginia became the 38th state-- and that's how many you need to make it the 28th amendment. But the Trump regime has already moved forcefully to prevent that. Let me explain. First the text of the resolution proposing the amendment (H.R. 208):

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission by the Congress:

"ARTICLE —

"Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

"Sec. 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

"Sec. 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification."

Did you know that the ERA was first introduced in 1923? The Senate finally passed it in 1950. Eisenhower was more vocal about getting it passed than any other president had been and back in those days passing the ERA was part of the Republican Party platform. The AFL-CIO, the ACLU and many Democrats-- particularly progressive Democrats-- opposed it, primarily because they feared women would lose beneficial labor protections that had been hard-won past victories. JFK campaigned on it but backed off it entirely once he was elected president.

In 1971 a joint resolution passed the House 354 to 24 (51 not voting) and the following year passed the Senate 84-8 (7 not voting). Nixon, the president, endorsed it and off it went to the state legislatures-- with a deadline of Natch 22, 1979 to get 38 states. Within days it had been ratified by Hawaii, New Hampshire, Delaware, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska and Texas. By 1977 Indiana voted to ratify and the whole thing kind off petered out. Then 40 years later Nevada suddenly ratified it (2017), followed by Illinois (2018) and then yesterday, the 38th state-- Virginia, where it passed both houses.

But in the meantime, 4 very backward conservative states-- had their legislatures rescind their ratification: Nebraska, Tennessee, Idaho and Kentucky. No one knows if legislatures are even allowed to rescind ratification, so that will have to be litigated, as will Congress' decision to extend the deadline for ratification.

As of today there are 12 states that haven't ratified, although 6 of them have one of the houses of the legislature voting to ratify: South Carolina, Oklahoma, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri and Noth Carolina. Three states have had votes but the amendment was defeated: Arizona, Arkansas and Mississippi.

The most recent congressional action came at the end of last year when Jackie Speier's bill to abolish any time limits for ratification-- H.J.Res. 79, which has 224 co-sponsors, enough for passage. Passage is now being pushed by Democrats and generally opposed by Republicans, although there are 2 Republican co-sponsors making it, at least superficially, bipartisan.

That brings us to state 38 and Virginia's vote yesterday. The House of Delegates voted 59-41 to approve (a bipartisan victory) and then the Senate voted 28-12 (including 7 Republicans, one of whom was Tommy Norment, the Republican minority leader).

One far right sociopath, Senate Republican Amanda Chase, insisted that all the ERA does is use women as political pawns for liberal causes.

The Trump/Barr Department of Justice issued a legal opinion before the Virginia legislature voted that the deadline to ratify had expired and it didn't matter what Virginia did. Without a court decision the ERA can't be added to the Constitution. Trump screwed women again.

No one has been able to get a comment from Ivanka but we did reach out to two of the public officials who I know who have been the strongest advocates of equal rights I have ever known, Georgia Senate candidate Teresa Tomlinson, former mayor of Columbus, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus and represents Seattle.

Pramila celebrated on Twitter yesterday... and to me, she said "What a great moment in history-- and a huge step forward for equality! The Equal Rights Amendment is about equality, pure and simple. It is about ending the second class status of women in America. We all know that we have a long way to go in achieving equality for all women. The gender pay gap continues for all women, with women of color bearing an even greater burden. Women who work full time, year-round still only make 82 cents on the dollar for men’s earnings, amounting to an annual gender wage gap of over ten thousand dollars. Black women make only 62 cents, Latinas make 54 cents, and Native women make 58 cents for every dollar paid to white men. And close to two-thirds of minimum wage workers are women. Not only are women more likely to earn minimum and sub-minimum wages-- they are also subjected to exploitation and sexual harassment in the workplace and on the streets. We now have 38 states that have approved the ERA. In November, I joined my House Judiciary Committee colleagues to pass a resolution to remove the ratification deadline for the ERA, bring us closer to a day where all people, regardless of gender, are equal under our Constitution. Women deserve to see their equality recognized. It is past time-- we need to finally ratify the ERA."

Blood On His Tiny Hands by Nancy Ohanian

How The Republican Party Began Their War Against Women By Defeating The Equal Rights Amendment

It isn't news that George Will is using his skills as a right-wing propagandist to try to undermine the work of the Senate's #1 proponent of individual liberty against the encroachments of the CIA and NSA, Mark Udall. It's no secret which side of that existential battle Will and his ilk are on. In a Washington Post column last week datelined Denver, no less, Will takes on Udall not because he's the Senate's champion of privacy rights, but because he's a champion of women's rights.

"One of the wonders of this political moment," Will asserts, "is feminist contentment about the infantilization of women in the name of progressive politics." And, the whole war on women is completely made up, he insists. "Access to contraception has been a constitutional right for 49 years (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965). The judiciary has controlled abortion policy for 41 years (Roe v. Wade, 1973). Yet the Democratic Party thinks women can be panicked into voting about mythical menaces to these things." Somehow Will forgot to mention that the Republican party has been working hard to overturn both and that his boy Cory has been a leader in that movement-- until he decided to run for statewide office. Now, says Will, Gardner is trying to make "amends for formerly advocating a state constitutional 'personhood' amendment (it is again on the ballot this year and will be decisively rejected for a third time) and for endorsing similar federal legislation that has zero chance of passage. By defining personhood as beginning at conception, these measures might preclude birth control technologies that prevent implantation in the uterus of a fertilized egg. On this slender reed, Udall leans his overheated accusations that Gardner is bent on 'trampling on women’s rights,' is on a 'crusade' for 'eliminating' reproductive freedoms and would 'outlaw birth control'.”

The Republican Party hasn't always been the bastion of fear and loathing for women that Will is trying to claim it isn't-- despite all the evidence that it is, like the GOP unending battle against equal pay for equal work and the pandering to primitive religionists-- like the Southern Baptists-- who insist that women are property. In his new book, The Invisible Bridge, historian Rick Perstein shows how the Republican Party didn't launch its War Against Women until Richard Mellon Scaife's pet project, ALEC, and Phyllis Schlafly figured out how to make money for themselves with it.

[B]attles were raging for and against the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex," ran its apparently anodyne text. The majority of the public supported the idea; respectable moderate Republican ladies being its main base of support, the Republicans had endorsed it in every one of their party platforms since 1944 and President Eisenhower had asked a joint session of Congress to approve it in 1958. They did so, finally, in 1972-- at which the movement to achieve the constitutional requirement in two-thirds of state legislatures, thirty-eight to be precise, took off like a rocket, with thirty ratifications by the end of 1973.

Then the progress became as slow as molasses.

Perlstein wrote that "Only four more states voted passage by the spring." The backward, reactionary states from the Old Confederacy had no intention of giving women any kind of equality and Perlstein points out that "a frantic right-wing movement" led by a crazed and militant Republican Party activist Phyllis "I'd like to thank my husband for letting me be here tonight" Schlafly, always brimming with hatred and bile, stop the process. Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, Arkansas, Virginia, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Missouri and, of course, Utah and Arizona all refused to ratify it and several increasingly right-wing oriented states, like Tennessee, Idaho, Nebraska and Kentucky, rescinded their ratification votes. Schlafly spent her time screeching about how the Amendment would lead women being drafted and to unisex bathrooms. Schlafly warned her fellow Republicans that giving women legal equality would lead to homosexuality and that it would "remake our laws, revise the marriage contract, restructure society, remold our children to conform to liberal values instead of God's values, and replace the image of a woman as virtue and mother with the image of prostiture, swinger, and lesbian."

One frightened conservative woman in Florida, typical of the kind of people who got taken in by Schlafly and other neo-Nazi activists within the Republican coalition said that "I do not want to share a public restroom with black or white hippie males." Florida never did ratify the ERA. No war on women here, though.

Perhaps next Will will take on the Hagan-Tillis race with his slick dunderheaded propaganda: