WaPo: “Virginia’s new Republican Attorney General ended a legal campaign to get the federal government to recognize the state’s ratification of the landmark Equal Rights Amendment, the long-running effort to enshrine women’s equality in the Constitution.
Attorney General Jason Miyares withdrew Friday from an appeal seeking to compel the U.S. archivist to certify that Virginia, Illinois and Nevada — the final three states needed for the amendment’s approval — had properly certified it.
Miyares’s decision is a blow to the movement to add the ERA to the Constitution, but the effort also faces a number of other unanswered legal questions and hurdles before it might become the law of the land. The amendment declares “equality of rights under the law shall not be abridged or denied … on account of sex.””