Ferriero has announced that he’s retiring in April, and the Senate will have to approve whomever Biden nominates as his replacement. Read: The Equal Rights Amendment is an artifact no more Democrats have also introduced legislative proposals either to remove the deadline for the ERA’s ratification or simply to affirm that it has met the requirements for inclusion in the Constitution. In response, a group of states has sued to force Ferriero’s hand. The archivist instead deferred to an opinion by Donald Trump’s Justice Department that the ERA is invalid because its final ratification came long after a congressionally imposed deadline. First submitted by the suffragist Alice Paul in the years after women secured the right to vote, the amendment states that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” In early 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the ERA and, according to its backers, the final one needed to meet the requirement that constitutional amendments win approval from three-quarters of state legislatures after passage by Congress.įerriero, however, has refused to certify the amendment.

Ferriero’s job isn’t glamorous or particularly powerful, but he’s lately been at the center of a fight over exactly how many amendments the Constitution should have.įor more than two years, Democrats in Congress and advocates for women’s rights have demanded that Ferriero formally publish what would be the Twenty-Eighth Amendment, the proposal known for nearly a century as the Equal Rights Amendment.

If fewer than half of all Americans can name a single Supreme Court justice, barely more than a few thousand (if that) can probably identify the current archivist, David Ferriero, a 2009 appointee of former President Barack Obama. That soon-to-be-vacant job belongs to the archivist of the United States, who functions as the nation’s chief record keeper and happens to be the presidential appointee responsible for certifying newly ratified amendments to the Constitution. But there’s a far less visible position Biden has to fill in the next few months that could make an even more immediate and direct change to the nation’s founding document. O ne of the hottest questions in Washington right now is who President Joe Biden will nominate to serve on the Supreme Court, the committee of nine charged with interpreting the Constitution.

Equal rights amendment text