The Nation's Pulse / Undue Process

...As everyone who has followed the stormy progress of the ERA is aware, time is running out for this most visible symbol of the so-called Women's Liberation Movement...

...On the one hand, they would like to see their particular vision of a perfect universe given constitutional sanction...

...Beyond the usual Revolutionary museum pieces—flintlocks, swords, and the like—it contains such objects of Americana as a lock of Washington's hair and a false wooden tooth said to be from his mouth, General Lafayette's badly-scarred writing desk (a testimonial, if there ever was one, that the pen is mightier than the sword), a wooden panel from Washington's presidential coach, half a bottle of Farquhar Madeira of 1789 vintage (auctioned for $3,000 in 1860), and, most interesting of all from the standpoint of military readiness, the camp chest of Baron Von Steuben, chief trainer of the Continental Army...

...Curios are the stock-in-trade of the Fraunces Tavern Museum...

...Department of Energy daily scratch their noggins about problems that could best be solved by eliminating their jobs...

...Basically, I believe that to the extent sex is an illegitimate factor in official decision-making, it is already illegal under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and that the ERA is therefore unnecessary...

...The Bella Abzugs of the world, of course, are little concerned with such matters...

...India, with its plentiful labor and scanty savings, invests in capital-intensive heavy industry and wonders what to do about unemployment...

...While congressional passage of an amendment requires a two-thirds vote in each house, pro-ERA forces assert that a simple majority is sufficient to extend the ratification period...

...Thus, backers of the amendment will permit states to change from "no" to "yes," but the conThe American Spectator November 1978 27 verse is to be forbidden...

...At this writing, this curious effort seems disturbingly likely to succeed...

...Charles Lindblom, a political economist at Yale, has long been one of the most articulate chroniclers and advocates of this "rediscovery of the market...

...And the economic transformation of South Korea, which defies all pronouncements on the hopelessness of Third World poverty, is due as much to a dollop of market freedom—to the entrepreneurial energy released by the sundering of bureaucratic straitjackets—as to a generous infusion of American aid...

...Now I will confess that, with respect to the substance of ERA, I am an opponent of the amendment, though not a particularly perfervent one...

...A present member is Laurance Rockefeller...

...The vocal minority which has led the push for ERA, never par cicularly concerned to project an impression of even-handedness or fair play, has abandoned any pretense to these values in this last-ditch effort to preserve its cherished amendment fromdefeat...

...28 The American Spectator November 1978...

...It takes no special training in law or constitutional history to perceive the cynical one-sidedness of these various positions...

...some former Anglers were Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, and Dwight Eisenhower (Richard Nixon, whose law firm was only a few blocks away, was a frequent diner at Fraunces but eschewed the fishing...

...As with every constitutional amendment in modern history, the ERA was given seven years to obtain the requisite ratifications by three-fourths of the states...

...and incentives of market prices, political leaders the world over have made decisions with consequences they did not intend...

...One can only hope that most of Congress will, upon reflection, adopt a more far-sighted and statesmanlike posture...

...Elbert, the museum janitor who was good enough to take me upstairs to see the sail loft—not open to the public—told...

...She was never heard from again...

...Although the seven-year limit was included in the ERA as passed in 1972, it is now argued that this is merely a "procedural" point, and not truly part of the amendment itself...

...The fact that it is dealing with a Constitution—a Constitution which has been a model of free government for almost two hundred years, and has been amended only fifteen times since the Bill of Rights—is being given scant, if any, consideration...

...The Sons, whose 500 members lay claim to being direct descendants of ancestors who fought in the Revolution (an ex-president of the Sons was Jackie O's father), have their headquarters in a warren of offices on the upper floors of the tavern...

...Yet a. new interest in markets is burgeoning, and in some unlikely corners...

...But the suppression of the market also results from some silly prejudices—from associating the marketplace with the dominance of corporate (and in many countries foreign) enterprise and with a grossly unequal distribution of income and wealth...

...which had previously ratified the amendment are considered effective...

...But my opposition to the extension proposal currently before Congress has nothing to do with my view of the underlying merits of the ERA itself...

...Similarly, not content with receivng an extension, which has never been given to any other amendment, ERA supporters insist that Congress declare past and possible future recisions of previous ratifications ineffective...

...One particularly notable meeting room and banquet hall, however, belongs to the Anglers Club of New York...

...And twenty thousand memo-writers at the U.S...

...Rather than accept this negative judgment of the traditional constitutional process, ERA backers have launched a frenzied lobbying effort in Congress for a three-year extension of the ratification period...

...Grover Rees—who apparently does possess such training—has gone further by persuasively demonstrating the absurdities implicit in the various ERA positions in an excellent recent article in National Review...

...All the history books of the Macmillans and the McGraw-Hills and the Silver Burdetts notwithstanding, such was the stuff of which the Revolutionary spirit of the Colonies was made and nurtured...

...His argument has not been libertarian: Freedom with a capital F seems to concern him little, and when it does, he is quick to point out the conventional but not-to-be-forgotten wisdom that market exchanges can be highly coercive in times of unemployment...

...The club has some 400 members in New York and around the world...

...In March of 1979, the seven-year period for ERA will expire, and the amendment will be either two or six states short of the necessary 38, depending on whether subsequent recisions by states Peter J. Rusthoven is an Indianapolis attorney...

...By ignoring for ideological reasons the informational signals Adam Meyerson, formerly managing editor of The American Spectator, is studying international business at the Harvard Business School...

...A congress, subject to intense political and electoral pressures, could pass an amendment one day, announce the next day that it had received evidence sufficient to satisfy it that three-fourths of the state legislatures had approved, and then declare the amendment a duly ratified constitutional provision...

...Often the reaction is a shrewd political instinct: Any self-respecting despot knows he must squelch a form of economic organization that diffuses authority and makes- a mess of planners' tidy diagrams...

...Finally, the ERA lobby, confident of success in the House and Senate, declares that decisions on all these issues rest in the exclusive province of Congress, and therefore, under the "political questions" doctrine, are not subject to review by the Supreme Court...

...A brilliant, if utopian, theoretician of the French Socialist Party, Michel Rocard, hopes to combine worker self-management with the decentralization and decision-making flexibility of the marketplace...

...The accomplishments of rural China result notonly from communal industriousness but also from the allocative efficiency of market-like pricing...

...Russia with its mighty forests has a paper shortage...

...When it comes to getting the amendment enacted, they are perfectly willing to act like so many ward-healers ramming through a questionable zoning ordinance...

...but if one other state then endorsed the proposal, it would become part of the Constitution...

...They lease the bar-restaurant to Norden while maintaining a museum, a colonial flag collection, and, in an adjacent building, a fifth-floor sail loft where sails for 19th-century clippers were built and repaired...

...The ERA position would leave no avenue of judicial challenge to such a high-handed procedure...

...THE NATION'S PULSE by Peter J. Rusthoven Undue Process In Washington this fall, supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment are treating the nation to a historically unprecedented spectacle...

...The Founding Fathers sought to insure substantially contemporaneous consensus among the states before any changes in our fundamental governing instrument would occur...

...me about an obnoxious lady from a historical society who, upon visiting the tavern a few years ago, remarked, "this isn't the oldest building in New York and I'm going to have a survey done to prove it...

...The tavern itself occupies only the eldest of a four-building complex whose various dining and meeting halls are interconnected by more dark passageways and creaking staircases than the average half-boozed writer can possibly comprehend...

...Conversely, to the extent the ERA would render suspect recognition of differences between the sexes in areas where such differences may indeed be important—for example, alimony and child-custody disputes—I think the ERA might well prove a nuisance and a source of bad law...

...then all 37 could, on more sober reflection, change their minds and rescind the ratification...

...In several states, one might note, ratification was achieved only after defeat in an earlier session of the legislature...

...Given the foregoing, and the fact that the change being advocated is one of constitutional dimensions, I believe rejection of the ERA is the wisest course...

...If, in the process, they do irreparable damage to the careful and deliberately difficult procedures for amending the basic charter of our Republic, they are unperturbed...

...Similarly, Rees illustrates the dangers of precluding Supreme Court review of the critical constitutional questions involved...

...alas, his collection of dry flies reportedly was a casualty of the bombing...

...BOOK REVIEW Politics and Markets Charles E. Lindblom / Basic Books / $15.00 Adam Meyerson Whenever they hear the word "market," half the world's leaders reach for their revolvers...

...A large, hand-built crate well-stocked with wine decanters, liquor flasks, and glasses, it was toted about on the back of Von Steuben's aide-de-camp like some fine piece of artillery awaiting the moment when,, forced to bivouac in some dusty, godforsaken place, the general found need to avail himself of its contents...

...Moreover, I believe, with George Gilder, that differences between the sexes are an integral part of human nature, and the source of much of the beauty and mystery of existence on this planet, and-that efforts to ignore and eradicate such differences, first, are mistaken, and second, would require totalitarian authority for successful implementation...

...Among other things, for example, Rees points out that the "no recision" argument is wholly inconsistent with the intent of the Framers in including the requirement that no amendment would be effective without approval of three-fourths of the states...

...With respect to the proposed extension, and the related arguments for "no recision" and "no Supreme Court review," a majority of Congress seems all too willing to treat this as just one more battle in the often cynical arena of partisan politics...

...To the degree that the ERA is a primary rallying point for those, like Bella Abzug, who nonetheless seem bent on such efforts, my opposition to the amendmentincreases...

...drunk with one), are not to be confused with the Sons of the American Revolution, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Society of Colonial Tavernkeepers, or the IOOF...

...The extension proposal, which has already passed the House, 'is a truly remarkable exercise in the politics of "it all depends on whose ox is being gored...

...In fact, members say, President Hoover may have been one of the world's greatest fly fishermen...

...The Anglers, whose annex to the tavern suffered the brunt of the 1975 bombing, are a private club of gentlemen anglers who pay $125 a year for the privilege of lunching together, selling $200 flyrods to one another, and sometimes fishing together...

...And without it, without a Fraunces Tavern in which the patriot of the day could consort and conspire with his likeLminded countrymen, well, we might all be sipping tea and drinking Guinness instead of munching peanuts and swilling Billy Beer...

...But under the ERA theory, Rees notes, 37 states could ratify an amendment that was riding a temporary wave of political popularity...