Last Friday, former President Biden declared the Equal Rights Amendment "the law of the land" - so why has it failed to become the nation's 28th constitutional amendment.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden announced Friday that the Equal Rights Amendment should be considered a ratified addition to the U.S. Constitution, making a symbolic statement that’s unlikely to alter a decades-long push for gender equality.

“The American Bar Association (ABA) has recognized that the Equal Rights Amendment has cleared all necessary hurdles to be formally added to the Constitution as the 28th Amendment,” Biden wrote. “I agree with the ABA and with leading legal constitutional scholars that the Equal Rights Amendment has become part of our Constitution.

President Biden says he believes the amendment has met the requirements to be enshrined in the Constitution. Its history has been long and complex.

President Joe Biden said Friday that he believes the Equal Rights Amendment, which guarantees equal protections regardless of sex, is the “law of the land” but stopped short of ordering the U.S. archivist to publish the constitutional amendment.

President Joe Biden announced on Friday that he considers the Equal Rights Amendment to have been ratified. His statement “affirm[ed] what I believe and what three-fourths of the states have ratified: the 28th Amendment is the law of the land,

If Biden really wanted to make the ERA the “law of the land,” he would have needed to direct the head of the National Archives to ignore the Department of Justice. But he didn't do that—or really anything for women's rights during his presidency.

The struggle over the Equal Rights Amendment started more than a century ago when leading suffragist Alice Paul first proposed it shortly after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.

Biden announced that the Equal Rights Amendment should be considered a ratified addition to the U.S. Constitution.

But what matters, legal experts say, is what Biden didn’t do: He didn’t order the archivist of the United States to formally publish the amendment. And he didn’t direct the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to withdraw its written opinion that the deadline for ratification expired long ago.