Remember the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)? Well, as he leaves office, President Biden is proclaiming that the ERA is the law of the land and is part of the Constitution. Wow! Who knew!

On Saturday, PJ Media reported the following:

Remember the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)? It’s back, and Old Joe Biden, trying to do as much damage to the nation as he can before he slouches off to his taxpayer-funded Delaware beach house for good on Monday, now says that it’s the law of the land. What’s that? You didn’t notice that we suddenly have a new Constitutional amendment? Well, we may not, but on Friday, Old Joe’s joyful announcement that the amendment was a done deal added an eggbeater to already troubled waters.

The ERA was a central preoccupation of the 1970s when the outgoing figurehead was just beginning his storied career as a leftist prevaricator, character assassin (see Clarence Thomas for details), and premier corruptocrat in the United States Senate. Feminists bombarded Americans with propaganda slogans including “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” and “A woman’s place is in the House… and the Senate.”

But when Congress approved the ERA on March 22, 1972, it set a deadline of seven years for the necessary three-fourths of the states to approve it. That deadline came and went on March 22, 1979, with only 35 states approving of the amendment. Thirty-eight were needed, so that was that. In 2017, however, as the #MeToo movement was cresting, Nevada became the 36th state to approve the ERA, with Illinois following in 2018 and Virginia in 2020.

So the amendment was over the line, with just one problem: the seven-year deadline had passed over forty years before Virginia ratified the thing. Even before Virginia ratified the ERA, Alabama, Louisiana, and South Dakota tried to head off its post-deadline passage, filing a federal lawsuit in 2019 to stop any other states from ratifying the amendment.

This is the statement from President Biden:

On January 27, 2020, the Commonwealth of Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. The American Bar Association (ABA) has recognized that the Equal Rights Amendment has cleared all necessary hurdles to be formally added to the Constitution as the 28th Amendment. I agree with the ABA and with leading legal constitutional scholars that the Equal Rights Amendment has become part of our Constitution.

It passed all of the hurdles except being in compliance with the Constitution. That is a problem. There is no way this becomes the 28th Amendment unless the process begins again with a seven-year deadline.