Why Did Biden Save Battle on Equal Rights Amendment for the Very End?

President Joe Biden has proclaimed that the Equal Rights Amendment is now the “law of the land”—with just days left in office.

“We, as a nation, must affirm and protect women’s full equality once and for all,”  the president wrote in a statement released Friday morning. “In keeping with my oath and duty to Constitution and country, I affirm what I believe and what three-fourths of the states have ratified: the 28th Amendment is the law of the land, guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law regardless of their sex.”

The ERA was introduced by suffragists in the 1920s and passed by Congress in 1972. But it wasn’t fully ratified, thanks to the activism of prominent anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, and has remained in legislative limbo ever since. At least 38 states must ratify a proposed constitutional amendment, and only 35 have ratified the ERA, with the most recent being Virginia in 2020.

Biden’s late-term announcement will likely do very little to actually advance the ERA’s chances of becoming a constitutional amendment. That lies in the hands of the national archivist and Congress. The national archivist, who publishes amendments, has already stated that she could not add the ERA without approval from Congress or the courts, as the 1982 ratification deadline was missed. And a Republican-controlled Congress won’t be so kind as to give Biden a win like this on his way out. 

It’s a disappointment for the reproductive rights activists who have been calling for the ERA to be ratified for some time, especially since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. 

While Biden’s statement is positive, the timing of such a critical piece of legislation—three days before Trump is inaugurated—leaves many asking where this energy was for the four years Biden was in office. 

The incoming forty-seventh president doesn’t seem to believe he needs to abide by the law when it comes to following through on banning TikTok.

Moments after the Supreme Court upheld Congress’s ban Friday on the popular video-sharing app, Trump claimed he would be making a “decision” regarding its future in the American market, potentially sidestepping two branches of the U.S. government.

“It ultimately goes up to me, so you’re going to see what I’m going to do,” Trump told CNN’s Pamela Brown. “Congress has given me the decision, so I’ll be making the decision.”

Trump did not provide more details on what exactly that would look like.

On Thursday, U.S. officials revealed that President Joe Biden would not enforce the ban through the end of his presidency, handing the responsibility of interpreting the law to Trump.

Experts have said the app will not disappear from users’ phones, though it will be restricted from the app store, and new updates will no longer be available—eventually rendering the app unusable, reported the Associated Press.

Trump claimed he spoke on the phone with Chinese President Xi Jinping, in part discussing the future of TikTok, minutes before the Supreme Court released its opinion.

“I just spoke to Chairman Xi Jinping of China,” Trump posted on Truth Social Friday morning. “The call was a very good one for both China and the U.S.A. It is my expectation that we will solve many problems together, and starting immediately. We discussed balancing Trade, Fentanyl, TikTok, and many other subjects. President Xi and I will do everything possible to make the World more peaceful and safe!”

Trump has pledged to save the platform, though it’s unclear how his team intends to do so. Once inaugurated, Trump could issue a 90-day pause on the ban so long as a sale is in progress, per the terms of the law. But that could be difficult, as Chinese law restricts the sale of TikTok’s proprietary algorithm, according to Bytedance’s attorneys. And Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar—who represented the Biden administration in the case—told the nation’s highest court last week that even the 90-day respite isn’t a guarantee.

As the Supreme Court unanimously voted to uphold the government’s impending ban on TikTok, Justice Neil Gorsuch made an interesting observation in his concurring opinion.

“Whether this law will succeed in achieving its ends, I do not know. A determined foreign adversary may just seek to replace one lost surveillance application with another. As time passes and threats evolve, less dramatic and more effective solutions may emerge. Even what might happen next to TikTok remains unclear,” Gorsuch wrote, but he then added a caveat.

“But the question we face today is not the law’s wisdom, only its constitutionality. Given just a handful of days after oral argument to issue an opinion, I cannot profess the kind of certainty I would like to have about the arguments and record before us. All I can say is that, at this time and under these constraints, the problem appears real and the response to it not unconstitutional,” Gorsuch continued.

Gorsuch, a conservative appointed to the court by Donald Trump in 2017, cast doubt on how much the ban may be able to achieve, national security concerns or not. Even some Democratic lawmakers who voted for the ban seem to be trying to backtrack in the final days before the deadline takes effect, a confusing about-face.

Meanwhile, while the right had previously pushed for banning TikTok, Trump now opposes it, likely because the app altered its algorithm to make his content perform better and because one of his wealthy allies, Jeff Yass, has a large stake in its parent company. However, there’s another major reason that politicians on the right and left wanted to ban the app: the proliferation of pro-Palestine content.

Biden, with just days left in office, has said it will be up to Trump to decide how to enforce the ban. It’s anyone’s guess what he’ll decide to do, although he’s never had a high opinion of anything supporting the Palestinians.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem struggled to commit to giving disaster relief to all Americans during her confirmation hearing Friday, because it wasn’t exactly what Donald Trump had said.

Senator Richard Blumenthal pressed Noem on Trump’s recent statements threatening to withhold disaster relief from California as it suffers from devastating wildfires in Los Angeles County.

“I am really disappointed with some of the statements that President-elect Trump has made,” Blumenthal said. He cited the president-elect’s own words when he claimed that if California Governor Gavin Newsom failed to reinstate Trump-era policies in his state, “we won’t give him money to put out all his fires, and we don’t give him the money to put out his fires. He’s got problems.”

“The spectre is there of potential discrimination based on politics,” Blumenthal explained. “Withholding money from California or other states. It’s not an unfounded fear. In the last administration there were public reports about President Trump withholding money from the state of Washington because of his disagreements with Governor Inslee.”

Blumenthal said he was also concerned about his own Democratic-led state, Connecticut, which had suffered from intense floods, noting that “these natural disasters are going to become more frequent.

“I assume you will agree with me that withholding disaster relief, by President Trump or any other chief executive of the United States, is a violation of his duty, and of law?” Blumenthal asked, testing to see if Noem was willing to speak against Trump.

She was not.

“Well Senator, leadership has consequences, and looking at the tragedy that’s happening in California is—” Noem started.

“I want to ask you, uh ‘yes or no,’ with all due respect. It’s an easy—” Blumenthal interjected.

“What’s happening in California is the ramification of many decisions over many years,” Noem continued, though it is still unclear what amount of the destruction was the result of alleged government and resource mismanagement. “But under my leadership at the Department of Homeland Security, there will be no political bias to how disaster relief is delivered to the American people.”

Blumenthal then asked whether Noem would stand up to Trump if he decided he didn’t want to allocate money because he didn’t like the governor or the politics of that state, such as Connecticut.

“Senator, in three days President Trump will take an oath to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law in this country, and I’ll be glad to have him back,” Noem said. “I don’t speak to hypotheticals, which is what you’re asking me to do. But what I will tell you is as secretary, I will do the same, I will deliver the programs as the laws dictate—”

“Well, it’s more than a hypothetical, with all due respect,” Blumenthal said, before apologizing for interrupting her.

“It’s more than a hypothetical. It’s based on experience with President Trump withholding money from Washington state and elsewhere. I need to know from you, will you stand up to the president and say no?” Blumenthal pressed, asking about the fate of the hundred billion dollars that had been appropriated for disaster relief during the last session of Congress. “Would you say no to the president if he withholds that money?”

“Sir, I don’t know about the scenarios that you’re referencing with President Trump, but I will tell you is that if given the chance to be secretary of homeland security that I will deliver the programs according to the law and that it will be done with no political bias,” Noem said.

“So you pledge to allocate and distribute that hundred billion dollars?” Blumenthal asked.

“According to how the program is written with no political bias,” Noem confirmed. “Every American deserves to be there and have disaster relief the same as their neighbors.”

Blumenthal confirmed that this was “basically following the law.”

President Joe Biden shared a tidbit of one of his conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding the war on Palestine, though the revelation didn’t leave either country in a particularly good light.

In his final interview in the Oval Office Thursday night, Biden recalled one of Netanyahu’s retorts for refusing to end his country’s war on Palestine. He claimed that the Israeli leader told him in the early days of the conflict that the United States shouldn’t be policing other nations’ warfare strategies in light of the country’s long trail of devastation.

“When I went to Israel immediately after the attack led by Hamas, eight days later or whatever it was, I told him that we were going to help,” Biden told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. “And I said, ‘But Bibi, you can’t be carpet bombing these communities.’ And he said to me, ‘Well you did it. You carpet bombed Berlin. You dropped a nuclear weapon. You killed thousands of innocent people because you had to in order to win a war.’”

“I said, ‘But that’s why we came up with the [United Nations],’” Biden continued with a smirk. “New deals by which—how what we do relative to civilians and military.”

“So he was comparing twenty-first-century war tactics, battle tactics, with World War II?” asked O’Donnell.

“Well, what he was really doing was going after me for saying, ‘You can’t indiscriminately bomb civilian areas. Even if the bad guys are there. Even if the bad guys are there, you can’t take out two, 10, 1,500 innocent people in order to get one bad guy,” Biden replied.

“And he made the legitimate argument, his perspective—‘Look, these are the guys that killed my people. These are the guys that are all over in these tunnels. Nobody has any idea of the miles of tunnels that are down there. The only way to get to them is to take out the places under which they got to the tunnels.’”

Biden then likened Israel’s ensuing assault on Palestine to America’s “war on terror” after the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Biden’s response is a particularly damning indictment of how his administration handled ceasefire negotiations. It makes it clear that Biden knew early on that Netanyahu intended to indiscriminately target Gaza—and did little to stop him.