The U.S. Justice Department says the Equal Rights Amendment can no longer be ratified because its deadline expired decades ago, throwing a barrier in the path of activists who want the amendment enacted if ­Virginia’s new, majority Democratic legislature approves it, reports The Washington Post.

Thirty-eight states are required to pass a constitutional amendment, and only 35 had approved it before the 1979 deadline and a subsequent extension to 1982, explains the Post‘s Patricia Sullivan. Two more states ratified the ERA since 2017, and Virginia would be the 38th.

The ERA Coalition said it “strongly disagrees” with the DOJ’s memo.

Read the Washington Post article.

Trump International Hotel
Image by Mike Peel

A federal appeals court in Virginia heard arguments Thursday about whether to revive a lawsuit accusing President Trump of violating the Constitution by profiting from his hotel near the White House, according to a report by  The New York Times.

The hearing marks the first time that a full appellate court has considered the emoluments or anticorruption clauses of the Constitution, and Trump is the first president to be sued for allegedly violating those clauses, writes the Times‘ Sharon LaFraniere.

The hearing was a spirited session that indicated sharp divisions among the judges over the legal consequences of the president’s conduct, according to LaFraniere.

Read the  NY Times article.

Legal experts predict the National Rifle Association won’t get far in its lawsuit challenging San Francisco’s decision to brand it a terrorist group, but that could change if the city takes action against contractors that work with the NRA, according to one First Amendment scholar.

If the city cuts ties with contractors that do business with the gun rights advocate, “that would violate the First Amendment because it would punish people and entities for their association,” University of California, Berkeley, professor Erwin Chemerinsky told Courthouse News Service Tuesday.

University of California-Hastings law professor David Levine said, “I don’t think the NRA can do much about it. I think a better plaintiff would be a vendor saying you can’t do this to us.”

Read the Courthouse News Service article.

President Donald Trump’s threats against NBC for news coverage he didn’t like are not unprecedented, says Dallas First Amendment lawyer Paul C. Watler of Jackson Walker LLP.

On Wednesday, after NBC reported that sources said Trump raised the idea of increasing the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the president tweeted: “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!”

“There is a long history of American presidents criticizing the coverage they receive in the press,” said Watler. “There is an equally long history of American journalists doing their jobs despite presidential disfavor.

“A few presidents, most notoriously Richard Nixon, actually attempted to turn their dislike of the media into official retaliation by government agencies or regulators. But those vengeful efforts at official harassment were abject failures.

“The First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press stands as a fundamental bar to the type of vindictive action that the current president seems to contemplate or encourage. As long as we have federal judges who are true to their oaths to uphold the Constitution, media organizations should be protected from efforts to intimidate or subvert independent news reporting.”

Watler, a commercial litigator, has represented numerous news media organizations over the years in First Amendment and libel matters.

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