For the past few years, Democrats have been trying to resurrect the Equal Rights Amendment, a constitutional amendment proposed to the states in the 1970s that failed to win enough support to be ratified. Its deadline for ratification has long since passed — 1982 was the official cutoff date — but the Left is determined to bring it back to life as a means of unilaterally imposing its agenda on the public.

Fortunately, one of its legal gimmicks failed in court this week. In 2020, three states went to court arguing that the ERA should be published as the 28th Amendment of the Constitution because they had decided to ratify it in the 40 years since the cutoff. Their support for the ERA’s ratification, the states argued, should guarantee its passage, even if the deadline for ratification had passed.

House Democrats passed a resolution in support of the effort, and the Senate held a hearing on Tuesday to consider its own resolution validating the ERA. But just as the Senate’s hearing began, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled against the Democratic states, arguing they couldn't ignore Congress's deadline.

This might seem like a niche legal debate, but the implications of the court’s decision are important. First, the decision upholds Article V of the Constitution and the amendment process it prescribes. If Democrats had been allowed to implement an amendment retroactively that was clearly rejected by the public at the time of its introduction, our constitutional order and the very idea of self-government would have been undermined.

Second, the court’s decision prevents Democrats from using the ERA to impose a radical agenda that the public never asked for or approved. The Democrats have made no effort to conceal their true intentions in this fight. They’ve admitted they believe the ERA is the means of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of “gender identity,” which is a nice way of saying they plan to enshrine gender ideology into law. They’ve also said the ERA could create a new legal right to abortion and paid family leave, among other things.

In other words, the ERA is a Trojan horse for all of the leftist policy preferences that Democrats have no chance of passing legislatively. It’s an attempt to circumvent the legislative process (and thus the will of the people) altogether. For that reason alone, the federal appeals court’s decision striking down the Democrats’ deceptive maneuver is a welcome one.

Kaylee McGhee White is the Restoring America editor for the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the Independent Women's Forum.