The ratification of the ERA, a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that fell short of the needed states' support to make it into the founding document, has been a recurrent issue in the recent history of the North Dakota Legislature. Lawmakers voted to reaffirm their ratification decision in 2007. More recently, the Senate narrowly rejected a resolution which held that North Dakota's ERA ratification had lapsed in the 1970s.
But this time around, the movement to walk back the state's ratification has picked up more steam, as a mirror of the measure rejected last session, Senate Concurrent Resolution 4010, advanced from the Senate last month and now rests in the hands of the more conservative House.
"I breed horses, and if it's dead it's dead. It's hard to get it back on its feet," said Sen. Janne Myrdal, R-Edinburgh, in testimony backing the resolution to roll back North Dakota's ratification of the ERA on Thursday, March 18.
"There is a radical movement to say this is still the will of the people in North Dakota, to say that you all and members of both chambers voted on this," she said. "Well, we did not."
Myrdal and other opponents of the ERA argued that the amendment has been warped over the decades to buttress pro-abortion laws and upend gender norms. Its backers say inclusion of the ERA in the Constitution would provide protections for both men and women.
"My question is, do we move forward, or do we turn back the clock?" said Kristie Wolff, executive director of the North Dakota Women's Network in Thursday's hearing, who argued that the Constitution provides only an option to ratify, not to rescind. "Let us send an important message to our children that one of the most cherished values as a state and as a nation is equality."
Had the ERA been ratified by the states, it would have written equal treatment of men and women into the Constitution. Without it, the United States is one of only a few countries without equal treatment based on sex or gender explicitly written into its constitution, according to the WORLD Policy Analysis Center.
Debates over the ERA have grafted heated gender equality and social issues onto a more mundane procedural disagreement. After Congress passed the ERA in 1972, it set a 10-year deadline for the amendment to get ratification in at least three-fourths of the states, a necessary threshold for inclusion in the Constitution. North Dakota became the 34th to ratify in 1975, but Congress' deadline expired without the country reaching the requisite three-quarters.
Still, even after the 1982 expiration date came and went, several states have belatedly ratified the amendment while others have voted to rescind their ratification — with the implications of these reversals still unclear.
Then a year ago, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify, meeting the three-fourths requirement — if the handful of reversals are ignored — and reinvigorating hopes among the amendment’s proponents that they could still get it written into the Constitution. Just this week, the Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives voted to void the 1982 deadline in order to validate the late ratifications by some states.
In North Dakota, efforts to preserve the Equal Rights Amendment have drawn support from a large chunk of the Republican caucus, a bulwark that stymied efforts to reverse ratification in 2019.
Sen. Judy Lee, R-West Fargo, spoke against the resolution before it narrowly advanced out of the Senate last month, calling it "a sharp stick in the eye" to those who have worked for the equal treatment of men and women through the decades.
Another supporter of the amendment, Rep. Pamela Anderson, D-Fargo, said she has no expectation that the state's ratification of the ERA will hold now that the resolution has made it out of the Senate chamber, though she questioned the legal legitimacy of revoking an action that has stood for more than 40 years.
This year's ERA resolution has landed under different circumstances from last time, as charged social issues have become a persistent theme of the legislative session. In a historic vote two weeks ago, the House voted to expel a representative over a series of sexual harassment allegations, in a marathon floor session in which one woman representative testified that she had been a target of the harassment. And Anderson noted that the effort to roll back the ERA ratification also comes against the backdrop of high-profile debates over a separate piece of legislation, House Bill 1298, which would restrict the participation of transgender athletes in high school sports in North Dakota.
The longest serving North Dakota lawmaker, Rep. Bob Martinson, R-Bismarck, recalled that the ERA was a defining issue of the legislative session when its ratification passed in 1975. Martinson voted for ratification at the time and recounted that halls of the North Dakota Capitol that year were constantly packed with the amendment's proponents and dissenters, with legislators constantly hounded to state their position.
For Martinson, it was always an easy call.
"All of the women in my life, that I love dearly, all supported it," he said. "I decided right away that I was going to support the Equal Rights Amendment."
And though Martinson said he intends to vote against the resolution to nullify ratification when it comes to the House floor, the stakes don't feel as high today.
"I think it's much ado about nothing," he said. "How do you say that the people who voted in 1975, that they were wrong?"
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly described the specific action outlined by Senate Concurrent Resolution 4010. It would clarify that North Dakota's ratification of the ERA lapsed with the expiration of the Congressional deadline, but it would not "rescind" the ratification. The story also incorrectly stated the proportion of states needed to get a proposed amendment into the Constitution. It's three-fourths.
Readers can reach Forum reporter Adam Willis, a Report for America corps member, at awillis@forumcomm.com.
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46 years later, North Dakota lawmakers aim to rescind ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment - Grand Forks Herald
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