ERA Campaigners Need to Improve Their Game

The other day I received an update about the effort to get the Equal Rights amendment added to the US Constitution. It linked to a video which, it was promised, would explain the legal strategy planned.

The good news is that it does so. The bad news is that the campaigners are doing a piss-poor job of educating the public about this, which I believe hampers their efforts. Here's what I wrote to my Less Wrong meetup group about it.

I mentioned at a recent meetup that I had yet to see an explanation of how ERA campaigners expected to overcome the deadline attached by Congress to the version of the amendment it passed in 1972.

Yesterday I received an email from Equal Means Equal, linking to the video below, in which it was stated that the legal strategy is explained therein. So I started watching the video with some hope, but also with a wait-and-see attitude, since the text of the email went on to remind the reader of the centuries-long delay between Congress' proposal of the Madison amendment proscribing them from raising their pay during their own term, and its ultimate addition to the Constitution.

I expect any critically thinking reader would immediately think, as I did, "Why are you telling me this about the Madison amendment? Isn't the reason it could be adopted after such a long delay simply that it had no deadline attached to it, whereas the ERA did?" And, as a natural follow-up, "Is the reason you're mentioning this that you don't actually have a better, more relevant argument?"

Well, it turns out the first speaker at the event which this video records does mention the same fact about the Madison amendment -- but she also goes on to explain the actual legal argument they intend to use. That argument is that the purported deadline appears in the preamble Congress attached to the ERA when they  passed it, but not in the text that the states actually ratified.

Assuming this is factually true, and reviewing the language of Article V, it does indeed appear the "deadline" in the Congressional preamble has no legal force, and therefore the campaigners' strategy is a sound one.

Which prompts the question: why the heck wasn't this explained in the email in the first place? Why, instead, does it tell me something completely irrelevant about the Madison amendment?

In fact, in all the many months I've been receiving information from EME, not once has the legal strategy been explained, leaving me, until now, skeptical that, once the thirty-eighth ratification actually happens, it will have any Constitutional effect or be more than a symbolic victory.

Why don't EME and other groups involved in this campaign seem to understand that, if they want to build the maximum public engagement to put pressure on politicians, they need to explain as clearly and prominently as possible why this is constitutionally doable and won't turn out to be waste of effort? It makes me scratch my head.

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