Assignment task:
"The Second Half of the Article V Process"
Congressional champions of ERA in the early 1970s simply did not expect problems securing state approval. Neither Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana nor Representative Martha Griffiths of Michigan, the measure's principal congressional sponsors, anticipated any difficulty in winning ratification for the ERA. "Maybe some other folks thought of it," Bayh later recalled, "I didn't."
...A prime reason for such inattention was a misreading of the history of constitutional amending. Here again ERA supporters focused on the limited data of recent experience rather than the much larger body of evidence available from taking a longer view. Since 1960, in addition to ERA, there had been no fewer than eight major efforts to amend the Constitution. Four amendments were added to the Constitution to deal with poll taxes, participation of the District of Columbia in presidential elections, presidential death or disability, and suffrage for 18 to 21 year olds. At the same time, other amendments failed that would have limited the power of the Supreme Court, overturned its rulings regarding legislative apportionment and school prayers, and provided direct popular election of the president. In every one of these cases, a notable struggle occurred in Congress. Four times when the battle was won, states quickly ratified the amendments, all in less than twenty months. In the other four instances, good reason existed to believe that states would have ratified if Congress had approved an amendment. Thus little attention was given to the second half of the Article V process [i.e., ratification by the state legislatures]. As a result neither congressional sponsors, supporters such as NOW, nor anyone else prepared to campaign vigorously for ERA ratification in the states.
...Following a century largely devoid of serious amending activity, save for the three Civil War amendments forced on the South, the twentieth century had already produced twenty substantial and often lengthy attempts at constitutional reform. The southern response had shaped the fate of these amendment efforts. Only one of the eleven former Confederate states had ratified the Twenty-third, or District of Columbia Presidential Voting Amendment, only two the Twenty-fourth or Anti-Poll Tax Amendment. Earlier all but three held out against the Nineteenth, or Woman Suffrage Amendment, and none ratified the Child Labor Amendment. Each of these amendments was achieved with difficulty or, in the case of the Child Labor Amendment, not attained at all. But when five of the southern states accepted the Seventeenth Amendment for direct election of senators, it had more easily won adoption. Moreover, throughout the twentieth century, amendments sailed through ratification when embraced by a majority of the southern states, as had been the case with every other amendment from the Sixteenth in 1913 authorizing the income tax to the Twenty-sixth in 1971 permitting eighteen-year-old suffrage. Furthermore, questionable amendment proposals, such as Representative Louis Ludlow's war referendum plan of the late 1930s as well as budget balancing requirements and Senator John Bricker's proposal to restrict presidential foreign policy authority in the early 1950s, gained serious attention in no small measure due to southern support. Every constitutional amendment proposal with southern backing had to be taken seriously; without such underpinning any amendment became problematic and required almost universal endorsement from non-southern states for adoption.
After reading the article on the Equal Rights Amendment above, summarize the author's thesis statement about the Equal Rights Amendment in one or two sentences. To support your answer, quote one or two sentences from the article that conveys the author's central point. Need Assignment Help?