Progressive House Democrats are demanding that President Joe Biden take executive action in his final days in office to certify the Equal Rights Amendment and commute death row sentences, arguing that he “has the ability, right now, to make a change.”
In two separate press conferences on Tuesday, members of the “Squad” gathered outside the U.S. Capitol to call on Biden to act before President-elect Donald Trump and a Republican Congress take control of the federal government in January.
At a press conference led by Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), several activists joined the lawmakers in asking Biden and the U.S. Archivist to certify and publish the ERA, which was introduced over a century ago and has faced objections that it can no longer become the 28th Amendment to the Constitution.
“You have the opportunity, President Biden, to make equal rights a defining part of your legacy,” Bush said. “All it takes is your signature. I can’t sign it. We can’t sign it. Only you can make this happen with just a stroke of your pen. You can protect so many people today. President Biden, you must take action and take it now.”
Many supporters of the bill, including Bush and her progressive allies, argue the ERA has satisfied all of the necessary requirements to become the 28th Amendment. Virginia became the 38th and final state needed to ratify the amendment in 2020.
However, the threshold was not reached by a 1982 deadline, and five states have since rescinded their support of the amendment, calling into question legally whether it becomes the law of the land.
At the second press conference, held on Tuesday afternoon, progressives urged Biden to commute sentences for all 40 individuals sitting on federal death row, guilty or innocent.
Biden disappointed Democrats and angered Republicans when he announced last week he would pardon his son, Hunter Biden, who was convicted of tax and gun felonies this year. It set off a firestorm, with many progressives urging the president to focus on those they say are suffering from mass incarceration. Republicans called the move an abuse of his pardon powers.
“With 40 days left in his presidency, we must move with urgency and ensure that history never repeats itself,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) said, referring to the decades-high number of federal executions carried out during the first Trump administration.
“He has the power, and he has the authority,” Pressley said of Biden. “Now, this is not only the just thing to do for President Biden as a man of faith and in honoring his campaign promise to address the federal death penalty. It’s not just good policy. It is also good politics.”
During a press conference on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to answer questions on calls to commute death row prisoners.
Advocates on and off Capitol Hill have redoubled their efforts to codify the ERA into law, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning the federal right to an abortion in Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Nicole Vorrasi Bates, founder and executive director of Shattering Glass, cited another case, United States v. Skrmetti, in urging Biden to sign the amendment. The case revolves around whether a Tennessee law banning transgender care for minors violates the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee.
“We keep saying, ‘We’re not going back.’ Well, we know we have gone back,” said Vorrasi Bates. “Last week, the Supreme Court made crystal clear in U.S. v. Skrmetti at oral argument that in June, we will be going back to a time when more than half of the population doesn’t have 14th Amendment equal protection.”
“But it doesn’t have to be that way. We have the Equal Rights Amendment,” Vorrasi Bates added.
The fight to certify and publish the ERA has cast a shadow over Biden’s presidency since he took office. former U.S. Archivist David Ferriero, who served from 2009 to 2022, declined to publish the ERA as part of the Constitution. Acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall, who served from 2022 to 2023, did not move to publish the amendment, either, despite letters from equal rights groups like Free Speech For People and Generation Ratify urging Biden to tell her to do so.
Bush and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) introduced the ERA Now Resolution in July, urging current Archivist Colleen Shogan to certify the ERA. Gillibrand led 46 senators in sending a letter to Biden in November, calling on him to make the ERA part of the Constitution.
In response to a Washington Examiner inquiry regarding Shogan’s stance on the ERA, the National Archives pointed to a 2022 statement, from when Shogan was not archivist, that details a finding from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The panel found that “because that deadline has expired, the ERA Resolution is no longer pending before the States” but that “the 2020 OLC Opinion is not an obstacle either to Congress’s ability to act with respect to ratification of the ERA or to judicial consideration of the pertinent questions.”
Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-VA) said it was “absurd that 101 years later, we are still fighting the same fights as our mothers, our grandmothers, and our great-grandmothers.”
“We will continue to fight if necessary so that our daughters don’t have to,” she added. “But we’ve done the work.”
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Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) said voters get discouraged “because they see people in positions of power, who have the ability to make change, not take that power.”
“There is no downside for President Biden to accept that it is ready,” Balint said.
