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It's an old joke, but when a argue and man argue against two beautiful ladies like this, they're going to have the last word.

She spoke not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity.

She said, I ask no favor for my sex.

All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet or for our next.

Welcome back. This is Strix Scrutney, a podcast so fierce, it's fatal. In fact, I'm Melissa Murray. I'm Kecha.

We are your co-host today. We are without Jamie and Leah, but fear not, we are with a full slate of fantastic Supreme Court news and court culture. What do we have on deck today, Kate?

We're going to start with some breaking news, both inside and a little bit outside the court. We will then preview the January sitting. A few cases there are a bunch on deck for January, so we're going to preview just a subset of them and we're going to end with some court culture specifically justices in the wild.

For breaking news, our first bit of breaking news is about an update to the Equal Rights Amendment. As many of you know, Virginia seems poised to become the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.

If that's the case, it would be the last state needed to ratify the amendment. For those of you who aren't familiar, the Equal Rights Amendment had its real push in the 1970s.

Then it kind of faltered amidst a huge campaign propagated by American Housewife, Phyllis Shaftley. There was about to be a new movie with Kate Blanchett playing Shaftley.

But in any event, the ERA had a clause in it that the legislatures of three-fourths of the several states would ratify the amendment within seven years from the date of its submission by the Congress.

Then they set that deadline as 1979. In 1978, Congress extended the deadline by three years with support from President Jimmy Carter.

It was not constitutionally required to lend a support, but he did so as a symbolic matter. Nevertheless, the ERA failed to get support from the requisite number of states to be ratified as an amendment.

But in recent years, that kind of interest in the ERA has been revived and advocates have revived the effort to ratify the amendment saying that Congress could either retroactively cancel the deadline or that the original deadline itself was invalid.

However, here's the wrinkle, the DOJ has weighed in and it disagrees. In a memo that was posted on January 8th, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Engel wrote that Congress is required that the ERA resolution be ratified within a fixed period.

And whether the effect of deadline was in 1979 or 1982, that time has come and gone.

The memo takes a position that there is only one clearly legal way for the ERA to continue to have Congress restart the process by reproposing the amendment to the states.

It does consider the possibility that had been previously endorsed by the Office of Legal Counsel in the 1980s that ratification could remain open if both the House and the Senate approved a joint resolution removing the original deadline, but it also suggests that it is extremely skeptical of that being a legal alternative.

So with the Trump administration on one side and the state level advocates on the other, we are shaping up for a pretty big fight about whether the ERA can go forward.

And there's a question. So the Office of Legal Counsel is obviously not the final word on the permissibility of this route to ratification. So I think there are questions. One, arguably it is Congress and not the Office of Legal Counsel that has the final word as to the mechanism of ratification, but it is also the case that you could imagine a court being asked to provide a definitive resolution.

And so there I think the question is how this dispute could get before a court in the first place, right? Does the attorney general of a ratifying state bring a suit?

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