That was revolutionary. Granted, some states and some cities had already been moving in this direction, but now it was mandated that all states do so. President Carter requested $804 million in his 1979 budget to assist states in accomplishing the mandate.
The big accomplishment was the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. The effort was spearheaded by Justin Dart, Jr., who came to be known as the godfather of the ADA. Dart, the child of a wealthy Chicago business executive, suffered from polio in 1948 and fought against racism while attending the University of Houston in 1952. His father was a close adviser to Ronald Reagan, for whom Justin Dart Jr., briefly worked as commissioner of rehabilitation services in the education department. According to his New York Times obituary, he left that position after criticizing the department during congressional testimony. He went on to work for the first Bush administration and fought vigorously for the Americans with Disabilities Act passage.
He did not fight alone. The images of disabled people climbing the steps of the Capitol building, demanding passage of the Act, will forever be seared into my memory.
Now the United States Congress, led by the fearless Paul Ryan (recipient of the $500,000 Koch go-fer award), has passed the ADA Education and Reform Act, or H.R. 620, which rolls back hard-won protections of the ADA. (Paul Ryan may claim Ayn Rand as his spiritual guide, but I am willing to bet that Orwell taught him his vocabulary.)
David M Perry, writing for the Pacific Standard, explains the two main “education” and “reform” pillars of the law:
H.R. 620 works on two fronts. First, it demands that the federal government offer businesses more education about the ADA, while not providing additional funding to implement that education. In fact, the DOJ already provides such education. As we've covered at Pacific Standard, the Department of Justice has been rolling back guidance documents that clarify how the ADA works, so the best guess about H.R. 620's education statute is that it's a way to cut enforcement activity by making the DOJ spend more money on education.
The second front—notification—is more pernicious. Right now, businesses that are found to be non-compliant can be held immediately accountable. That seems fair, given that the ADA has been law for 28 years. Under the new bill, a person who encounters an accessibility obstacle would need to give a written, technical notification to the business (which often will require a lawyer to do correctly), wait 60 days for that notification to be acknowledged, and then wait 120 more days for "substantial progress" to be made in resolving the accessibility issue. If, after 180 days, there hasn't been substantial progress (it's not clear quite how that standard would be regulated), the disabled person who first encountered the accessibility obstacle can then sue. They still won't be able to collect damages.
As he explains elsewhere in the article, the Department of Justice only has a small division to actually oversee the implementation of the ADA; the law relies on private citizens to file complaints of non-compliance via lawsuits. Those lawsuits do not allow any financial damages, only court costs and legal fees.
The International Council of Shopping Centers has been pushing this revision, claiming that certain unscrupulous lawyers have filed multiple lawsuits that are a threat to their commerce, i.e. profit, and that this type of behavior must be stopped at all costs. Well ... at all costs to someone else. In this case, they will allow the disabled community to bear the cost of the bad behavior of the lawyers instead of demanding that the state bar associations or the courts rein in the lawyers.
A favorite bogeyman case seems to be one that took place in California 10 years ago, wherein a plaintiff was ordered by the court to stop filing lawsuits against businesses.
Part of the problem, Peters says, is that California has higher standards than the federal ADA mandates, leading some business owners to mistakenly believe they are in compliance when they are not. The federal standard requires businesses to do what is readily achievable — that which can be carried out without much difficulty or expense, determined by practicality and the financial resources of the individual business. In California the standard is any discrimination or distinction in the way a business provides goods or services to the able-bodied and disabled. "If you fully comply with the ADA — and only with the ADA — in California, you can still be sued," says Peters. "Only 2% of buildings are compliant in California since the ADA guidelines went into effect."
We still hear about this case as an example of the problems with the ADA, even though it is not a problem with the ADA, but with the California Bar and the courts. As for the real victims (who are the disabled, not the retailers):
Andrew Imparato, president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities, says his organization's biggest concern is that when the lawsuits are filed, a settlement may be reached, but the access issue is not addressed. "We'd like to see federal judges in a jurisdiction where lots of cases are being filed looking at the phenomenon and trying to work on a solution that results in improvements in accessibility," says Imparato, "and not lining the pockets of plaintiffs or boutique law firms that make a business out of it."
Everyone wants the issue resolved, but restricting the ability of a citizen to file a complaining lawsuit against a business that is in violation of a 28-year-old law does not seem to be the only (or even a remotely fair) way to correct a bad situation.
As the bill progresses to the Senate we now have an opportunity to make our voices heard, and it is important that we do so. Not because I had to use a walker for a couple of weeks, or because your son’s best friend is in a wheelchair, but because we cannot ever let our country return to a past wherein so many of its citizens were restricted to a life viewed through a window. We are better than this.
This may all sound somewhat alarmist, but in 1973 a woman could get a safe, legal abortion just about anywhere in the United States. Last week Vice President Mike Pence suggested that legal abortion will end in “our time.” Judging by how many steps backward we have taken across this country, and how many doctors have been killed, I tend to believe him.