Penna Dexter
In one of his final lawless acts, just three days before leaving office, President Biden proclaimed that the Equal Rights Amendment is “the law of the land.” Congress passed this amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1972 and gave it seven years to achieve ratification by three fourths of the states.
Proponents claimed the ERA would protect women’s rights by prohibiting discrimination based on sex.
Thirty-five states ratified. In a constitutionally questionable move, Congress extended the deadline three more years. Still the amendment failed to garner the necessary support of 38 states. Five states rescinded their ratifications. The ERA expired. It’s dead.
The ERA would not protect women’s rights. Over a decade of consideration, it became clear it would severely undermine many commonsense protections for women and could be used to end even modest restrictions on abortion.
According to Kristin Waggoner, President of Alliance Defending Freedom, the ERA is worse today than it was in the 70’s. She points out: “the word ‘woman’ never appears in the ERA.” Instead,” she writes, “the amendment focuses on ‘sex’ — a word increasingly in danger of becoming meaningless as ideologues push to disassociate the term from biology and replace it with ‘gender identity’.”
Under state and local ERA-type policies, women and girls are already seeing their physical privacy, their athletic opportunities, even their physical safety compromised.
In a misguided attempt to revive the ERA, Nevada and Illinois passed bills to “ratify” the amendment. Virginia did so in 2020. Supporters claimed victory. But, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council, twice, declared the ERA “expired.” So did the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Archivist of the United States would be the person responsible for the amendment’s publication. Dr. Colleen Shogan and her deputy declared, just last month, that the ERA “cannot be certified as part of the Constitution due to established legal, judicial, and procedural decisions.”
Someone must kill the Zombie ERA.

Kerby Anderson
Although Congress needs to reevaluate various programs like Social Security, it is unlikely it will do so for two reasons. First, it would be politically unwise to even modify any of the so-called “entitlement programs.” It is the third rail of American politics. Touch it and you die.
But the other reason isn’t political; it’s cultural. Americans have an expectation of retiring at age 65. Morgan Housel has a chart in his book The Psychology of Money that illustrates this. The labor force participation rate for men age 65+ was 78 percent in 1880 and only dropped to 58 percent by 1930. But Social Security changed all that. Today the labor force participation for men 65+ is 27 percent.
Social Security wasn’t intended to provide a pension for retirement. When Ida May Fuller cashed in the first Social Security check in 1940, it was for $22.54 (that would be $416 when adjusted for inflation).
Even before Social Security was implemented, many in the Western world began to believe retirement begins at age 65. Germany was the first nation to adopt an old-age insurance program. This was 70 years before President Roosevelt proposed the Social Security system we have today.
Some brave politicians have suggested we might at least raise the age of retirement. As Morgan Housel reminds us that “It was not until the 1980s that the idea that everyone deserves, and should have, a dignified retirement took hold.” But also reminds us that the 401(k) didn’t exist until 1978, and the Roth IRA was not implemented until 1998.
Congress needs to address the financial concerns about the future of Social Security, but politics and cultural expectations make it hard to do so.