Two yes or no questions…
Did the Nebraska legislature ratify the ERA on March 29, 1972?
Did the Nebraska legislature ratify the ERA?
Yes to the first, No to the second.
Now your turn -
Did the Nebraska legislature rescind its ratification on March 15, 1973?
Did the Nebraska legislature rescind its ratification?
Regards,
Shodan
Your answers are logically inconsistent.
My answers to your questions are yes and yes, but I’ve said all along that states are free to rescind ratification.
Saying they are free to do it, but it doesn’t have the force of law, is a meaningless statement.
Regards,
Shodan
This is bizarre. It has a very specific meaning. It also has historical precedent to back it up.
You do, I don’t. The Tenth Amendment reserves all rights not mentioned to the states and the people, and I think the right for a state to make a time sensitive offer is within their prerogative.
There is no such “when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states” if, at the time of Virginia’s ratification, more than one fourth of the states refuse to endorse the proposal. “Three fourths of the several states” is calculated at the instant of the latest ratification, not when the amendment was originally proposed. To say that ratification of the legislatures of three fourths of the several states simultaneously refers to the “several states” of today, and their long outdated opinions from decades ago, is to twist the text of the constitution on its head.
~Max
But there’s nothing that says they can rescind either. Thus, it doesnt appear they can, however obviously it will be up to SCOTUS.
Very weird.
Did Nebraska ratify the amendment? Yes.
Is the amendment ratified by Nebraska? No.
The Constitution doesn’t say that an amendment will go into effect after ratified by three-quarters of the states; it says that it goes into effect when ratified by three-quarters of the states. There needs not only be a time when 38 ratifications are in the past; there needs to be a time when 38 ratifications are in the present.
To all those who think a state can rescind- how about if a state wants to now rescind their approval of say, the 13th & 14th Amendments? It doesnt specifically state they cant do that, now does it?
Those are already part of the constitution, and therefore the highest law of the land. According to the Supremacy clause, states cannot unilaterally change the constitution.
~Max
Yes, it does say that. Once an amendment becomes part of the Constitution, the process for that amendment is finished, and if a state wants to remove the amendment, the process starts over.
See, for instance, the Eighteenth and Twenty First Amendments.
Regards,
Shodan
I think this is deep into dubious grammatical nitpickery. It is pretty much the norm that that construction means “when X has happened.”
Really the only question of interest is the 7-year deadline, later extended to 10.5 years. My Google-fu is weak this morning; I can find the language of the proposed amendment itself, but not that of the text that includes the 7-year deadline.
I notice that Amendments 18, 20, 21, and 22 include the 7-year deadline as part of the text of the Amendment itself, while the deadline for the ERA is not included in that text. I’d be interested to know what the legal eagles here think about whether and in what ways that difference might matter.
Yes, I meant individual states cannot unilaterally change the constitution by revoking an amendment.
~Max
According to a possible interpretation of the law, the answer to the first question is yes, the answer to the second question was yes until it was recinded at which point the answer became no.
In the same way the question
Did Michgan pass a law against serving alcohol on Sunday in 1998? Yes.
Does Michigan have a law that makes it illegal to serve alcohol on Sunday? No.
Since the Constitution doesn’t define “ratify”, presumably the way to answer this question will be to look at historical uses of the word and determine if it was a one-way process that couldn’t be revoked or if it was the other thing.
From a practical point of view, it seems weird to me that you’d want an Amendment process to be a ratchet that could only move inexorably toward conclusion. Do we really want to have an Amendment to the Constitution happen if one current state legislature thinks it should even if others that previously thought it was a good idea have officially changed their minds, or been voted out by The People who didn’t want that Amendment? I find that to be pretty hard to square with my understanding of early American political history.
Seems pretty hard to argue that states that rescinded their approval decades ago are part of a group of states “united in the desire of a particular amendment”.
“When everyone has arrived, we can start the meeting.”
Jane arrived five minutes early, but then had to duck out to use the restroom. Seven minutes later, everyone else is here, but Jane hasn’t gotten back yet. Do we start the meeting?
It’s weird that you changed the verb there. Did you think no one would notice?
In my experience that meeting starts without Jane.