Equal rights fight under Trump 2.0 shifts to the states

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Axios

6 hours ago


Weeks into Trump 2.0, Equal Rights Amendment advocates see a bleak political landscape. Instead of focusing on the U.S. Constitution, many are zooming in on the states.

Why it matters: The century-long fight for sex equality under U.S. law faces new challenges as the Trump administration guts DEI initiatives and rolls back civil rights measures.

Advocates tell Axios that neither litigating before the conservative Supreme Court nor attempting a two-thirds majority in a deeply polarized Congress is an immediate winning strategy.

The real momentum for the ERA lies in the states, mirroring the reproductive rights strategy since Dobbs, says Ting Ting Cheng, the director of the Equal Rights Amendment Project at Columbia University Law School.

"What are the strategies here if we don't have hands on the levers of power right now?" she posed. "There's still so much to be done, and a lot of it resides in the states."

How it works: The federal ERA, first drafted in 1923, would establish gender equality as a constitutional right. That would include:

prohibiting sex-based discrimination;

strengthening legal protections against discrimination (in education, pay, health care, employment, and government programs);

expanding protections beyond existing laws like Title IX and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which can be repealed or weakened.

Read more: https://www.axios.com/2025/03/22/equal-rights-amendment-state-constitutions

[NotHardly]

1. 1st Nazi Rule: kill off the weakest first..

1. Women
2. the underprivileged
3. the ill, disabled, children
4. and wait for the rest to surrender without a fight