ERA: Rehashing the 70s

George Will hits the nail on the head in his TownHall.com column today:

Liberals, dolled up in love beads and bell-bottom trousers, have had another bright idea, one as fresh as other 1970s fads. Sens. Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer and Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler, high-octane liberals all, have asked Congress to improve the Constitution by adding the Women's Equality Amendment, which, like the Equal Rights Amendment before it, says: 'Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.'

Will shows that the feminists and their "useful idiots" had to usurp the Constitution to have a hope of getting their grab bag passed:

They asked Congress to extend by three years the time allowed for ratification -- although the first 10 amendments (the Bill of Rights) had required only 27 months and no amendment had to that point required even four years. In doing so, Congress disregarded the constitutional morality that an amendment should succeed only if a predetermined period of deliberation produces a consensus that is (in the Supreme Court's words) "sufficiently contemporaneous" to reflect the will of three-fourths of the states "at relatively the same period."

If they think women are getting such a raw deal, why not pass legislation to fix it? The usual reason: when libs know their ideas are too wacky for reasonable people to accept, they opt to bypass Constitutional goverment and get the oligarchs in the judiciary to do their work for them:

If Kennedy and like-minded legislators think the condition of American women needs improvements, they should try to legislate them. Instead, they prefer to hope that liberal judges will regard the ERA's language as a license to legislate. But, then, support for the amendment testifies to the supporters' lack of confidence in their ability to persuade people to support such policies.