; Whereas Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020 observed, when explaining why she thought the Equal Rights Amendment needed to start over, If you count a latecomer on the plus side, how can you disregard States that said we’ve changed our minds? ; Whereas, in Idaho v. Freeman, 529 F. Supp. 1107 (D. Idaho 1981), Judge Marion Callister of the United States District Court for the District of Idaho held that article V of the Constitution did not permit Congress to extend a ratification deadline, writing, Once the proposal has been formulated and sent to the States, the time period could not be changed any more than the entity designated to ratify could be changed from the State legislature to a State convention or vice versa. Once the proposal is made, Congress is not at liberty to change it. ; Whereas, on March 5, 2021, Judge Rudolph Contreras of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia held in Virginia v. Ferriero, 525 F. Supp. 3d 36 (2021) that the deadline contained in the Equal Rights Amendment Resolution was constitutionally valid and that the legislative actions of 3 State legislatures in 2017 through 2020, purporting to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, came too late to count ; Whereas Judge Contreras noted, Inclusion of a deadline was a compromise that helped Congress successfully propose the ERA where previous attempts to pass a proposal had failed. ; Whereas, while Judge Contreras found it unnecessary to reach the question of whether Congress could retroactively alter a deadline, he did observe that the effect of a ratification deadline is not the kind of question that ought to vary from political moment to political moment … Yet leaving the efficacy of ratification deadlines up to the political branches would do just that.