Cori Bush Wants to Weaponize the Constitution Against Your Values

Cori Bush just said the quiet part out loud, and we should all be paying attention.

The former Missouri congresswoman, who lost her primary last year after voters finally tired of her antics, appeared on The Lurie Daniel Favors Show with a message that should alarm anyone who values constitutional restraint. If she manages to claw her way back into Congress, Bush plans to champion the Equal Rights Amendment as a vehicle for enshrining abortion and transgender ideology directly into our founding document. Not as separate issues to be debated on their merits, mind you, but smuggled in through the back door of what sounds like a reasonable amendment about equality.

This is how the left operates. They take something that sounds innocuous, even noble, and turn it into a Swiss Army knife for every progressive cause they can’t win at the ballot box.

Bush told the SiriusXM host she was the lead sponsor of the ERA alongside Rep. Ayanna Pressley, making history as the first two black women to sponsor the bill at its 100-year mark. That’s great symbolism, truly. But symbolism doesn’t excuse the substance of what she’s proposing. When Bush describes what the ERA would actually do, she doesn’t stop at workplace discrimination or educational access. She goes straight to “trans rights” and “abortion rights” as core components of what she calls gender equality.

Let’s be clear about what’s happening here. The Constitution wasn’t designed to be a wish list for whatever social movement happens to be trending. It’s a framework for limited government that protects individual liberty while allowing communities to govern themselves on matters that affect their daily lives. The founders understood something Bush apparently doesn’t. Not every policy preference belongs in a document meant to restrain government power, not expand it into every corner of American life.

The ERA has been kicking around since 1923, and there’s a reason it never got the ratification it needed. Americans instinctively understood that amending the Constitution should be hard, should require overwhelming consensus, should reflect enduring principles rather than political fashions. Bush wants to resurrect this amendment precisely because she knows her agenda can’t survive the normal legislative process in most states.

Think about what she’s actually proposing. She wants to take debates about biological sex in sports, about parental rights in medical decisions, about the protection of unborn life, and remove them entirely from democratic deliberation. One amendment, and suddenly every state law reflecting local values becomes unconstitutional. Every school board decision becomes a federal case. Every protection for women’s spaces gets litigated into oblivion.

This is constitutional hardball dressed up in the language of equality. And it reveals something important about the progressive project right now. They’ve lost patience with persuasion. They’ve abandoned the hard work of changing hearts and minds. Instead, they want to use the Constitution as a cudgel to force compliance with views that millions of Americans find deeply troubling.

You know what’s ironic? The same people who lecture us about threats to democracy want to bypass democratic processes entirely. They’ll tell you that protecting women’s sports from biological males is discrimination, that preventing minors from irreversible medical procedures is bigotry, that any restriction on abortion at any stage is oppression. But they won’t trust voters to make those calls.

Bush lost her primary to Wesley Bell, a more moderate Democrat, because even her own party’s voters recognized she’d drifted too far from reality. Her defeat should have been a lesson about the limits of radical politics. Instead, she’s plotting a comeback with an even more extreme agenda.

The Constitution deserves better than this. So do the American people.