crossposted from unbossed
Anyone who pays attention to laws enacted to protect worker rights will notice that they all have the same lifecycle. Law is enacted. Rights in the law are attacked. Judges hand down cases that weaken the law. Two recent laws where you can see this dynamic are the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act.
But now one Republican has now taken up the fight to restore worker rights under Americans with Disabilities Act.
Background
This dynamic of legislative birth and decline . . . and revivification happened with Title VII. Almost from the time it was enacted, its rights were whittled away. I won't go through the myriad ways in which judges weekened it. Some would require a long explanation to understand - and were therefore caused more harm. You couldn't get people outraged, as a result.
Finally, in 1991, Congress legislatively reversed these judicial "amendments" by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Congress chided the Supreme Court for its decisions right in the text of the CRA:
The Congress finds that -
. . .
(2) the decision of the Supreme Court in Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio, 490 U.S. 642 (1989) has weakened the scope and effectiveness of Federal civil rights protections . . .
ADA
Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr., (R-Wisconsin), an author of the Americans with Disabilities Act, has long felt that that enough is enough and tried to restore the rights Congress intended disabled Americans to have. The courts have all but made the ADA a useless piece of legislation. They have limited the definition of what a disability is and created impossible to meet procedural and definitional barriers, to name just a few.
"Seventeen years ago, Congress took a major step to break down physical and societal barriers that kept disabled individuals from fully participating in all aspects of American life," Sensenbrenner said. "The ADA restores the full meaning of equal protection under the law. Although we’ve made great progress for disabled Americans, our work is not complete. The Supreme Court has chipped away at some of the ADA’s broad protections, and this is unacceptable. One of my primary goals this Congress is to restore the ADA’s clear and comprehensive national mandate for the elimination of discrimination on the basis of disability."
In September 2006, he introduced H.R. 6258 [109th]: Americans with Disabilities Act Restoration Act of 2006, a bill that died when that congress adjourned. Link to Sensenbrenner bill announcement.
A new attempt at such a law is in the works. Recently Rep. Sensenbrenner gave the Tony Coehlo lecture at N.Y. Law School in which he laid out the need for such a law. Here is Tony Coehlo's description of the lecture and invitation to it.
March 26th for the Third Annual Tony Coelho Lecture in Disability Employment Law & Policy. Our speaker will be Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, the former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and one of the most important voices in Congress on disabilities employment issues.
This is a critical time in Washington for the Americans with Disabilities Act. As you know, the Supreme Court has dramatically curtailed the scope of this essential civil rights law. Most troubling, the Court has interpreted the ADA to deprive millions of Americans of the law's protections. That's not what Jim Sensenbrenner and I intended when we originally sponsored the ADA in the late 1980s.
Now, I am working with Congressman Sensenbrenner to restore the ADA. His speech on March 26th will lay out some of the principles and goals of the legislation he will co-sponsor with other leading members of Congress from both parties. In my view, the speech will be a critical moment for the disabilities movement and anyone who is interested in civil rights and justice. I hope you will be there to witness it.
Here is the link to the text of his speech. You can view it here. In the talk, Sensenbrenner pulls no punches in criticizing the Supreme Court for disabling the ADA.