The Justice Department has thrown a roadblock into efforts to revive the Equal Rights Amendment, finding that an expired pair of deadlines imposed by Congress on ratification of the measure means it’s too late for additional states to ratify it now. The memo by Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel comes as Virginia is poised to become the decisive 38th state to approve the ERA nearly four decades after Congress sent it to states in 1972, attaching a 1979 ratification deadline to it. “Because three-fourths of the state legislatures did not ratify before the deadline that Congress imposed, the Equal Rights Amendment has failed of adoption and is no longer pending before the States,” Engel wrote.
