Latest Push to Revive Equal Rights Amendment Fails in Senate: What Happened?

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On Thursday, Senate Republicans stopped the Democrats from passing a special law called the Equal Rights Amendment. This law was created to end discrimination against people based on their gender and has been around for more than 50 years.

However, not enough people voted in favor of it, so the 1982 deadline that was set for it to be passed couldn’t be removed and people weren’t allowed to change it anymore.

A vote has happened in the Senate but it seems like it won’t pass. It needed to get 10 Republican votes and only got 2. For this resolution, two Republicans – Maine Senator Susan Collins and Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, voted “yes”. The Senate Majority Leader (Chuck Schumer) from New York wanted to put this up for a vote as last year’s Supreme Court decision was about getting people a legal right to have an abortion.

Senator Schumer said that women in America don’t have many rights now compared to what they had before. After the vote, he stated that the Senate will keep trying to pass a measure that would ensure equality for everyone under the law.

Back in 1972, Congress sent an amendment which proposed this change in rights and it gave states seven years to approve it. Later on, this deadline was extended until 1982. Unfortunately, by then not enough states agreed to ratify it.

Three years ago, the US discovered that Virginia was the 38th state needing to vote to approve an amendment. Since then, many states have voted to take back their approval of this same amendment. Even though they’ve voted in favor of it, it still hasn’t become a part of the Constitution since each state votes on its own.

The White House has announced that President Joe Biden strongly supports an extension of a deadline. This is because gender equality is really important for the whole society, not just ethically, but also to ensure our economic growth, safety and democracy remain healthy. However, Republicans have said that Democrats are trying to change history.

Senator Kevin Cramer, who is a Republican from North Dakota, said after the vote that the Democrats had come up with a way of doing things which was not following the rules and regulations set by our founding fathers. He said this new approach was just another way of trying to divide people into groups politically.