Julie Suk, a sociologist and legal scholar at the City University of New York, is working on a history of feminist constitutional struggles, to be titled We the Women. “My view is that Congress can extend deadlines,” she told me. It is harder to expand rights than to tend to housekeeping matters like presidential terms, she argued. “Anytime there’s an amendment that expands ‘we the people,’ it’s appropriate not to have these kind of limits.”

The arguments against retroactive extension are not easy to dismiss. If subsequent Congresses can change the terms of a constitutional proposal, legislators can claim they are being asked to vote on a measure whose fate is up to subsequent politics. And no one has resolved the rescission issue, which has been floating around since at least 1867.

There’s a case for guarding the text of the Constitution from unpredictable change. But on the other hand, neither Congress nor the archivist played that role in 1992, when one set of political forces was baying for a (admittedly minor) change in the text. If the Twenty-Seventh Amendment is valid, then popular mobilization clearly has a role to play in the process. The Constitution’s text may be held in the Archives, but “we the people,” not the archivist, writes its terms.

Finally, the OLC opinion ought to cause all constitutionalists—regardless of their view of this issue—a bit of concern. As noted above, it says Congress has no role to play in promulgating an amendment. Who does, then? In a soothing footnote, it says that the promulgation duty falls by statute on the archivist. It notes that OLC had earlier called this duty “a ministerial, ‘record-keeping’ duty upon the executive branch.”

Except this isn’t “ministerial” at all. Somebody has to decide whether the ERA is valid or not before there’s any “duty” to record it. And without quite saying so, the opinion claims that right of decision for none other than Attorney General William Barr.

An alert reader will have picked up subtle signs that I am not a neutral observer in this fight; for me, the memory of my mother, Rozanne Epps, dead these 11 years, looms over the entire dispute. She yearned for the ERA with all her heart, and was furious and distraught when the male leadership used parliamentary procedures to deny it a vote in the Virginia legislature four decades ago. I was in the legislative chamber when that vote was cast, and I can still taste that disappointment.

I cast no aspersions on the sincerity of the OLC opinion. But I confess that its conclusion—that the Trump Justice Department has now awarded stewardship of the Constitution to itself—sticks in my craw.

The Constitution’s text, and the history of Article V, which lays out the process for creating amendments, center on Congress. There’s no mention of the president or the attorney general. So clear was this from the beginning that George Washington refused to involve himself in the ratification of the Bill of Rights, on the grounds that this was reserved for Congress. And when the branches came nearly to swords’ points in 1868, Congress stepped in and claimed pride of place.