Olivia Extrum at Mother Jones writes—#MeToo Has Revived the Equal Rights Amendment:
Four decades after the Equal Rights Amendment—the proposal to enshrine gender equality in the Constitution—was declared dead in the water, women’s rights groups think now is the moment to finally get it passed. And they’ll be testing their hypothesis in Illinois this spring.
“People are really fired up,” said Bettina Hager, the DC director of the ERA Coalition, a national group of organizations pushing for ratification. “There’s an energy that’s been there, but it’s magnified in this moment in time. There is an opportunity here.”
The ERA, which says simply “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged…on account of sex,” was passed by Congress in 1972, at the height of the women’s movement. [...]
States had 10 years to pass the amendment, but conservatives and anti-feminist activists, led by the late activist Phyllis Schlafly—who claimed, among other things, that women would lose financial support from their husbands if the ERA was passed—fought fiercely against it. By the time the 1982 deadline rolled around, only 35 states had ratified—three short. The amendment was dead. [...]
The Illinois legislature is poised to prove whether 2018 is finally the year, with a vote on an ERA bill making its way to the Senate and House in April. [...]
The bill’s longtime supporters, state Sen. Heather Steans and Rep. Lou Lang, note that this year is already proving to be different. For one, there are several Republicans not up for reelection who Lang anticipates are likely to give their support. And, says Steans, the Senate’s brand new women’s caucus—formed in the wake of the #MeToo reckoning, will discuss the ERA before the vote.
“The stars are aligned,” Lang told Mother Jones. “Given the climate of our country today, I think it is a very important opportunity.”
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On this date at Daily Kos in 2008—EPA chief to CA: We’ve all got problems:
EPA head Stephen Johnson has finally released his official statement on why he denied California the emissions waiver needed to set tougher standards on cars. Prominent scientists at the EPA have been vocal in saying California had not only met the requirements to get the waiver, but that the law did not allow it to be blocked.
Johnson, already in the hot seat for overruling staff advice that he was legally required to grant California's requested waiver to regulate greenhouse gases, faces a litany of charges that he has also been duplicitous on an array of other scientific integrity, information suppression and workplace relations issues, said PEER.
So what was Johnson's justification for violating the law and -- for the first time in history -- not granting a waiver? His reasoning comes down to things are bad all over.
But Johnson wrote: "While I find that the conditions related to global climate change in California are substantial, they are not sufficiently different from conditions in the nation as a whole to justify separate state standards."
In other words, because we face global warming everywhere, Johnson isn't going to allow it to be addressed anywhere, even though an internal study conducted by the EPA showed that California does suffer disproportionately from the effects of global warming.