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Can Congress repeal a proposal to amend the Constitution of the United states, when it has not yet been ratified?
Has it ever happened?
(If I'm not mistaken, some state legislatures have voted to rescind ratifications of proposed amendments, and there has been some controversy about the validity of such an act, but a Congressional repeal of a proposal is another matter.)
There was an attempt to rescind the Corwin Amendment, which might have made it impossible to abolish slavery, but after the amendment was approved though not ratified by the states, there was an attempt in the Senate in 1864 to withdraw the amendment and halt ratification. That was apparently killed in the Senate Judiciary Committee, so it's still out there in constitutional zombieland.
Coleman v. Miller, 307 U.S. 433 and Dillon v. Gloss, 256 U.S. 368 address the matter of time limits on constitutional amendments, and do not directly address this question, but they do indicate in a read-between-the-line fashion that SCOTUS (or those SCOTUSes) is unlikely to get involved in such a question. If Congress sets a time limit, there is a time limit; if Congress doesn't, there isn't.
The Equal Rights Amendment was proposed by Congress with a ratification deadline of March 22, 1979. An extension of the deadline to June 30, 1982 was passed by Congress and signed by President Carter, but that extension was by simple majority. This is relevant in that if upheld by SCOTUS it could indicate that Congress can to some extent modify the status (if not text) of an approved amendment. The Idaho district court in Idaho v. Freeman 529 F.Supp. 1107 ruled on the question of whether Congress could extend the ratification period:
It, therefore, appears compelling that in order to fulfill the purposes for fixing a time limitation for ratification as outlined in Dillon — "so all may know and speculation ... be avoided" — the congressional determination of a reasonable period once made and proposed to the states cannot be altered. If Congress determines that a particular amendment requires ongoing assessment as to its viability or monitoring of the time period, it can do so, not by defeating the certainty implied by the Dillon case, but by not setting a time period at the outset and reserving the question until three-fourths of the states have acted.
But that ruling would have needed support from SCOTUS to have any influence on the instant question. Instead, that ruling was vacated as moot in NOW v. Idaho, 459 U.S. 809, which simply said
Upon consideration of the memorandum for the Administrator of General Services suggesting mootness, filed July 9, 1982, and the responses thereto, the judgment of the United States District Court for the District of Idaho is vacated and the cases are remanded to that court with instructions to dismiss the complaints as moot.
and thus they avoided ruling on the question of whether Congress could extend a deadline (at all: the Idaho ruling wasn't specific to the simple majority question).
So there's only one way to find out: Congress has to try for backsies, somebody has to sue up to SCOTUS, which will have to make a definitive ruling.
