Not a Tough Crowd

After two hours​ on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport, the flight was cancelled and we were deplaned. I had been seated next to a former congresswoman who lost to another incumbent in 2022 as a result of redistricting, after decades in the House of Representatives. Like me, she was on her way to Chicago to attend the Democratic National Convention. The next morning she was due to have breakfast with Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House, and in the afternoon there was a tea for the Equal Rights Amendment prohibiting discrimination ‘on account of sex’, first proposed in 1922 and ratified by the required 38 states as of 2020, but still not officially part of the constitution because of legal and procedural obstacles relating to a time limit set by Congress in the 1970s for the amendment’s ratification. With the Supreme Court now tilting right and reproductive rights being curtailed in many states, getting the amendment in the constitution was more important than ever, she told me. Most other liberal democracies had constitutional provisions of this sort, ‘even Japan’. She didn’t mention it, but it was the 104th anniversary of the day American women won the right to vote, with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in Tennessee. I was planning to attend a party that evening thrown by the Nation for Jesse Jackson. It was not to be. We waited on standby at the airport late into the evening. The former congresswoman chastised me for being insufficiently read in the works of Robert Caro. We watched each other’s bags in the line to be re-ticketed and I tried to help her with the airline app on her phone. ‘I used to chair committees and have an entire staff to do these things for me,’ she said. The last flight to Chicago left without us and we went our separate ways. I caught an afternoon flight the next day.