I accrued my notes, took a sip of water, and spoke in the Senate this month on behalf of the millions of Americans living with disabilities, and on behalf of many others who, whether they know it or not, are just a bad day. misdiagnosis, for getting a disability as well.
I went to the flat in his name, because I came to the floor while driving through the corridors of the Capitol in the wheelchair from which I wrote this. And I can just speak because 30 years ago, Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act, which gave millions of Americans like me more the full, independent life we deserve.
This landmark law was basically passed by committed activists who, in 1990, huddled in front of the same construction of the Capitol that I spoke about a few weeks ago to ask that their country nevertheless grant other people with disabilities the basic rights promised. through the Constitution. This has become law only because dozens of these heroes came out of their wheelchairs and climbed the 83 steps of the Capitol construction, and along the way, they refused to let one of them fight alone, providing others when they needed it. that, one step, a shoulder to lean on at once.
Thirty years ago, these activists were the hearts, minds, and votes of elected officials.
30 years ago, the Senate said other people like me mattered.
But this summer, Senate Republicans proposed a bill that says no.
On July 27, a day after celebrating the 30th anniversary of a Republican president who noted that the ADA would bring us “to a day when no American will again be at a disadvantage from his basic guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, “Senate Republicans brought the HEALS Act: a law that threatens to deprive our network of the same basic rights. I looked with surprise – frustration, outrage – as some of the senators who once defended the ADA tried to rebuild, brick by brick, the shameful wall of exclusion that Congress tried to bring down three decades ago.
Senator Orrin Hatch: I helped pass the Americans with Disabilities Act. Its long term is uncertain.
The timing of the bill may simply verify an alarming fact: the GOP has declared war on the disability network and the ADA. Although I hope that is not the case and that synchronization will be a deeply unfortunate coincidence, in the end the acts are much more eloquent than words.
If Senate Republicans need to show that they put a price on life, that they put a price on the civil rights of all Americans, they’ll have to join Democrats to support two measures that would show the disability network that the Republican Party remotely cares about.
First, we will have to save lives by avoiding a great institutionalization. Putting other people with disabilities in network care services where the threat of serious illness and death is the ultimate is reckless and unacceptable. But the Republican Party refused to provide a pressing 10% increase in investment for home-based services and the Medicaid community, despite our wisdom that Americans with intellectual and developmental disabilities die at a frightening rate when they inflame with COVID-19, and even though Republican and Democratic governors desperately want us to adopt this life-saving common-sense policy.
Second, Senate Republicans will have to abandon their efforts to empty the ADA once and for all.
The rights of persons with disabilities are human rights, and those civil rights will never have optional benefits that can be abolished when it suits them or less costly to employers or others in power. Allowing corporations to exclude workers with disabilities from reopening plans is precisely the kind of discrimination that the ADA has sought to abolish. However, the HEALS Republican Act can relegate millions of Americans to second-class status, sending the message that our network may be left out if prices for businesses are too high.
We have visibility. Now we want diversity: I live before the American Disability Act. Now we have to do more.
The adoption of the ADA aimed to record stories of discrimination in paintings in the history books. These outrageous examples of injustice were meant to constitute yesterday’s nightmares, not the truth of a tomorrow imaginable through a Republican proposal today. However, we’re here in 2020, and Senate Republicans are bratiser employing a fatal pandemic as a canopy to empty the ADA and reassemble this exclusion brick wall.
No one asks for special treatment. What we are asking is not to eliminate the basic rights that the Constitution promised centuries ago and which the House defended decades ago.
As we discuss this next aid program, the questions senators will have to ask themselves are simple: Are we going to leave Americans with disabilities behind? Are your lives valuable to save? Are your jobs sustainable?
For anyone who has a, for anyone who has a shred of compassion or even a little respect for the rule of law, the answers deserve to be obvious.
In the army, our soldier’s creed is never to leave a fallen comrade behind. The activists who climbed the steps of the Capitol had the same mindset: helping others fight on their way, centimetre by inch, closer to this last stage 83, refusing to let one of them fight unnecessarily.
I could only reach a senator through this act of courage and kinship, a concrete example of the motto on which this country was founded: “E pluribus unum”. Among many, one.
The way Republicans are acting right now will show whether they’re sacred, too. We can succeed over this national trauma. But only if we think not only of one, but of the multiple. In the midst of this crisis, with lives at stake and our economy hanging by a thread, it is the duty of all of us, fortunate enough to call us Americans, to act in a way that guarantees no one: no body, disability or in a different way, will be left behind.
Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat for Illinois, is a helicopter pilot and veteran of the Iraq war who lost legs in that war. He spent 23 years in the army and retired as a lieutenant colonel. Follow her on Twitter: @SenDuckworth