Pausing their denunciations of Donald Trump’s disregard of governing norms and disrespect of the Constitution, 46 Democratic senators have urged Joe Biden to do more of his own disregarding and disrespecting. Given his rule-of-law record (regarding student loan forgiveness, pardons and many other matters), he might.

The 46 have urged Biden to order Colleen Shogan, the national archivist, whose remit includes publishing and certifying constitutional amendments, to declare the Equal Rights Amendment ratified. If the president issues such an order, she will disregard it. Otherwise, Shogan would violate her written assurances to the Senate that confirmed her appointment: She said only a court order would cause her to certify the ERA’s ratification.

The ERA issue merits a final revisit because progressives’ latest maneuver illustrates their merely intermittent and selective devotion to constitutional and democratic proprieties, and their belief in limitless presidential power. To recapitulate:

In 1972, Congress sent the ERA to the states for ratification by the required three-quarters (38) of them within seven years. This deadline, which has been attached to every proposed amendment for a century, ensures that there is what the Supreme Court calls a “sufficiently contemporaneous” consensus for constitutional change.

When the ERA stalled three states short of ratification, and before its proponents plucked from thin air the claim that ratification deadlines are unconstitutional, they got a supine Congress to (purportedly) extend the deadline 39 months. Congress did this by simple majority vote, although the deadline was an organic part of the resolution that Congress had sent to the states by two-thirds majorities.

Four states rescinded their ratifications, so ERA proponents also had to declare that recisions, like ratification deadlines, are illegitimate. In 2021, a Barack Obama-appointed federal judge held that the ERA had expired decades ago. The original deadline was enacted 52 years ago.

Still, advocates say the ERA is just “one signature away” — the archivist’s signature — from entering the Constitution because the four states’ recisions are illegitimate, and the ratifications by three states long after — in Virginia’s case, more than four decades after — the original deadline are valid.

The previous archivist, David Ferriero, dutifully submitted the question of its status to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which said it was no longer alive. Ferriero said Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a self-described ERA “proponent,” twice told him what she several times said publicly: She thought it was necessary to go back to square one, to Congress, to restart the entire ERA ratification process. “Plus, a number of states have withdrawn their ratification,” she told a Georgetown Law audience in February 2020. “So, if you count a latecomer on the plus side, how can you disregard states that said, ‘We’ve changed our minds’?”

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York), organizer of 45 colleagues, says, “I have pitched this directly to President Biden,” and “he loved the idea.” Perhaps. But although love is a many-splendored thing, his does not refute any of the many arguments establishing that the ERA is dead.

Regarding Biden’s current mental competence to make such judgments, we have only the word of the sort of Democrats who, until the June 27 presidential debate, insisted he is sharp as a tack. We do know what his party then quickly decided about his competence.

The ERA (“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged … on account of sex”) might have made sense when first proposed a century ago. Since then, however, statutes and constitutional case law have rendered it superfluous.

Today, its advocates’ aim is to get it into a sympathetic court that will construe its vague wording as a license to, among other things, reverse the 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which reversed the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which overturned 50 states’ abortion laws. Today’s ERA resuscitation project aims to again nationalize abortion policy, which did so much to embitter national politics.

Last Tuesday, Archivist Shogan and Deputy Archivist William J. Bosanko said: “The ratification deadline established by Congress for the ERA is valid and enforceable,” and the ERA “cannot be certified as part of the Constitution due to established legal, judicial, and procedural decisions.” Case closed.

Three lessons from progressives’ ERA cynicism and sophistry: There are more forms of norm-shredding shabbiness than appear in Trump’s repertoire. Progressives’ reliance on presidential ukases to achieve their objectives indicates the collapse of their confidence in their persuasive powers. And cluttering the Constitution with the ERA would be as unseemly as the method of doing so.

George Will writes a column for the Washington Post.