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 Coelho
Speech on Disability & the 2004 Election
Jonathan Young, Justice For All, October 27, 2003
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On Friday, Tony Coelho -- former U.S. Congressman, original
House sponsor of the ADA, current AAPD Board Member -- delivered
a powerful address to the New York Law School. In the speech,
provided in full below, Coelho challenged all ten presidential
candidates to develop a solid, meaningful, more-than-rhetoric
agenda to reach the original goals of the ADA and improve
working opportunities for Americans with disabilities. He
demands -- as we all should -- that our next president pledge to
nominate judges who support the ADA, restore the ADA's original
intent, use the federal government to leverage higher employment
of disabled Americans, and break down the myriad barriers to
employment.
Read this speech. Use it as a road map for challenging the
various presidential campaigns.
Jonathan Young
Justice For All (JFA) Moderator, AAPD
=========================
Hon. Tony Coelho
Our Right to Work, Our Demand to be Heard:
People with Disabilities, the 2004 Election, and Beyond
New York Law School
October 24, 2003
We meet today out of a patriotic sense of national purpose - to
challenge the country we love to redeem its promise for every
American, including the 54 million of our citizens whom we call
people with disabilities.
We are a diverse country. All of us pursue our vision of
citizenship differently; all of us carry a special definition of
the ideal we want our nation to attain. This is what makes our
country vital and relevant well into its third century.
I believe America's greatest strength is its capacity for
progress and advancement; the belief that prosperity and justice
are not meant to be hoarded but shared; that when the American
dream is available to ever-greater numbers of us, that itself is
the well-spring of our national security and prosperity.
For generations of Americans, the right and ability to work at a
trade or profession was the key to realizing that dream, and the
national prosperity that followed.
But, as I learned when my epilepsy was discovered, when
legalized bigotry left me unemployed and unemployable, work
means much more than financial stability.
Work provides discipline and structure to our lives. It is a
source of identity and social acceptance. While love makes
relationships and family possible, work makes sustaining life
and building a material existence vastly easier. Without work we
are doomed to fail. With work, we may still fail, but we at
least have the dignity of trying to succeed for ourselves.
That is why I believe the right of Americans with disabilities
to work must become an important part of our national debate, as
we prepare to choose a president next year.
I have had the privilege of taking part in this national debate
for four decades. I have seen remarkable leaders and movements
push our nation forward. But during those years, only two men
fully tested the power of Presidential leadership to 'bend the
arc of history toward justice.'
One was a Democrat, born in poverty, a white man aligned with
the Southern establishment, who forced forward the cause of
black Americans; the other, a Republican, born to privilege and
aligned with business, who embraced the cause of the disabled as
his own.
Their gift of leadership was selfless: Neither gained political
advantage; and neither won another election.
But these men of enduring courage knew our society would be
incomplete, unless they fought for greater inclusion in our
national life. By signing the Civil Rights Act, the Voting
Rights Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, Lyndon
Baines Johnson and George Herbert Walker Bush earned lasting
places of greatness in America's history.
ADA was a landmark piece of legislation that led many of us to
think that we would enter a golden age for the disabled
community. This legislation was a true shift for the disabled
and began the process of opening the door of respect and full
participation to our community. But it was opened a crack, and
now there are those who want to slam it back shut.
Today, there are ten major party candidates running for
President - nine Democrats and President Bush - and all are good
people. Many say the right words and offer us the right
policies. We've heard disability plans, employment plans, and
health plans, and each one might well enable some disabled
Americans to live better, more independent lives.
But none of them has dared to take the concerns at the center of
our community and place them consistently at the center of their
campaigns. None has recognized the importance of work to our
agenda commensurate with the needs of our community. None has
acted, in the words of Dr. King, as the drum major for justice
that disabled Americans need our next President to be.
There are 377 days until the 2004 election. It's going to be
very close. To win this election -- and to govern with greatness
-- I believe that each candidate running for President should
look to our community for the margin of victory for his campaign
and moral advantage for his cause.
We have the power to decide the election; if we choose to use
it. But I am not sure that we will.
Let's be honest: We're not powerful. We're not registered or
rich. We're not really well-organized. Many of us fight
important battles for education and health care, but we're not
united in our priorities.
Some of us ask for everything, and that's completely
unrealistic. Some of us settle for the empty promise of more
federal funds; the empty gestures of White House summits or a
presidential advisor; or the empty warmth of rhetoric that too
often sounds like pity. And if we settle for those things this
year, we'll get nothing, or close to it; and shame on us if we
do.
We need a leader who brings his or her passion to our issues.
And we need a leader who will really lead -- like the first
President Bush so honorably did.
But leadership requires a challenge. The disability community
clearly has many. But today, I'd like to offer a new challenge -
to the candidates who need our votes and to the disability
community I love so much: pledge that you will do everything
within your power to ensure that this election will emphasize --
simply and directly -- our right to work.
Our agenda for work is powerful and clear: the Americans with
Disabilities Act is under savage attack in the courts, and we
must save it. ADA protections for the right to work are being
whittled away, and we must restore them.
The federal government's purchasing and hiring power to spur
this right to work for the disabled lies dormant, and we must
revive it. And the programs that lead to work -- programs that
educate, train, and address our medical needs -- remain
under-financed, and we must force Washington to honor these
commitments.
Many candidates ask for our support. But we can only support a
candidate for President who adopts this agenda for work, and
directly embraces our position on five core issues.
First, I believe the disability community should only support
candidates who pledge to appoint judges who will respect ADA as
the law of this land.
ADA is our community's single most powerful guarantor of the
right to seek work without fear of discrimination.
Yet, today it is under fire; the greatest threat to ADA is an
organized assault led by ideologues in the Federalist Society
and elsewhere, designed to tear down its protections and with
them our right to work.
Once conservatives warned us against judicial activism; now they
are the vanguard -- twisting the plain language of the statute,
ignoring legislative history, reviving long dormant and
discredited theories of states' rights, making a mockery of the
protections I wrote into this law.
Over the past four years, the Supreme Court has issued a
half-dozen decisions that have radically narrowed the scope of
ADA's coverage. But for sheer outrage, let me offer this trilogy
of cases: Sutton v. United Airlines, Albertson's, Inc. v.
Kirkingburg, and Murphy v. United Parcel Service.
The law clearly says that only a person with a physical or
mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major
life activities has a disability and is covered under ADA. In
those three cases, the Court held that whether an impairment
substantially limits a worker's activities must be determined by
taking into account "corrective measures" taken by the worker.
So, workers with monocular vision whose brains have compensated
so that they could functionally see; workers whose high blood
pressure is controlled by medication; and workers who wear
corrective lenses to reach 20/20 vision were no longer
substantially limited by their impairments, and their employers
were free to discriminate against them.
It didn't matter that every one of those workers was denied a
job because they had that very same condition; monocular vision,
high blood pressure, myopia. They have no recourse, because they
have effectively treated their disability.
That's like saying it doesn't matter that I have epilepsy -- if
I take Phenobarbital to control my seizures, and I do -- I am
not disabled, and am not protected by ADA.
The Supreme Court wrote me out of my own bill!
Well, excuse me, but I wrote this law. That is not what Congress
said. In fact, the House and Senate Committees that passed ADA
wrote in their reports that corrective measures should not --
should not -- be taken into account when determining whether a
worker has a disability.
Thanks to the occluded legal vision of a handful of conservative
jurists, it is becoming safe once again to discriminate against
disabled Americans seeking jobs. Since these Supreme Court
decisions, most lower courts have applied the Court's
interpretation to deny ADA coverage to people with disabilities
like epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, cancer, bipolar disorder and
diabetes.
This threat of judicial activism can only grow. We got a taste
of that this year when President Bush nominated Jeffrey Sutton,
a known opponent of ADA, to the U.S. Court of Appeals.
As a lawyer, Sutton branded core protections passed by Congress
for the disabled as improper and unneeded. He persuaded the
Supreme Court to prohibit state employees with disabilities from
suing their employers. He argued that disabled people should be
segregated in institutions. Sutton is a disaster for our
community, but President Bush nominated him and the United
States Senate let him through.
And Judge Sutton is only the beginning. There are 16 vacancies
in the Circuit Courts today, and twenty-five more in the trial
courts. The next President could nominate three or more justices
to a Supreme Court that has ADA cases on the docket this fall
and can expect more tests in the near future.
If the next President packs our courts with jurists who reverse
the plain meaning of the law -- as this Supreme Court has -- or
who batter ADA with strained versions of States' Rights
reasoning -- as this Supreme Court has -- or who deny workers
meaningful accommodations -- as this Supreme Court has -- ADA
will be no more.
Any candidate asking for our support must answer this question:
will you work to appoint judges who understand the importance of
broadening, not narrowing, access for the disabled to work?
Second, to reverse the damage caused by these decisions, we
should only support those candidates who pledge to restore ADA
to its original goals and purposes.
We must restore the coverage of people with disabilities under
ADA, undo the restrictions placed by the Supreme Court on the
classes of people protected by the law, and reopen the remedies
available to those who successfully prove ADA violations. We
must restore the responsibility for employers to comply with the
requirement for meaningful accommodations.
And we must reverse the Court's decisions that permit people
with diabetes, heart conditions, cancer and epilepsy to lose
their legal rights, because medications make them "too
functional" to be protected under the law.
The time is right for a candidate for President to propose an
Americans with Disabilities Rights Restoration Act, because we
want our right to work restored.
Third, I believe we should only support those candidates who
pledge to use the federal government's massive purchasing power
to increase the employment of people with disabilities in the
private sector.
Seventy-percent of blind and disabled Americans don't have jobs.
The federal government is the world's largest buyer of goods;
and I say it's time to put its purchasing power behind the
economic empowerment of people with disabilities. We can do that
in three simple ways.
First, the Executive Orders that prevent federal contractors
from discriminating against racial minorities and women should
also prevent discrimination against people with disabilities.
This means putting teeth into affirmative action for people with
disabilities. The Supreme Court recently ruled that diversity in
law school admissions is permissible, and I believe that equal
value should be placed on diversity in the workplace. Federal
contractors employ 25% of all Americans -- which makes these
employers a powerful force for getting more disabled workers
into jobs.
Most important, this proposal does not require an Act of
Congress; it takes only strong Presidential leadership and the
stroke of his pen.
Second, the federal government can reserve a portion of its
contracting for businesses owned by the disabled. The Small
Business Administration's 8(a) program does this already, for
small firms owned by women and the socially disadvantaged. Six
thousand American companies already enjoy this "foothold" in
contracting with the federal government.
During 1999 alone, the last year with published figures, these
small businesses got contracts with federal agencies amounting
to more than $6 billion -- helping to sustain nearly 200,000
jobs.
But business-owners with disabilities were not among those
firms, and that must be changed. One important strategy
for increasing the employment of people with disabilities is to
expand the number of entrepreneurs with disabilities. This
proposal will help accomplish that goal.
Third, the Javits-Wagner-O'Day Program creates jobs and provides
training for disabled workers, by requiring government agencies
to purchase selected products and services from nonprofit
agencies employing such individuals.
Under this law, however, only those employers who can prove that
75% of their labor hours are performed by people with
disabilities are eligible.
An employer doing a good job hiring people with disabilities can
still not qualify, unless he turns his workplace into a
disabilities ghetto -- and that's wrong. We need to lower this
threshold, so that more employers who hire the disabled will
benefit from federal government contracts without creating
segregated workplaces.
I believe that the late Senator Robert Wagner, who got his law
degree from this great institution, would proudly endorse the
change I recommend today.
Fourth, the disability community should only support those
candidates who will dramatically increase the number of people
with disabilities employed by the federal government.
The federal government should be leading the private sector by
example, but it is not. Let me give you just one example.
In July 2000, then-President Clinton signed an Executive Order
that required the executive branch to hire 100,000 people with
disabilities before ADA's fifteenth anniversary in the year
2005.
President George W. Bush neither repealed nor endorsed this
Executive Order, but it is still in force. According to the
latest data, the executive branch under this president only
hired 2,800 disabled workers in the following two years.
Employment in the Executive Branch is actually rising, but the
percentage of disabled government workers is shrinking. The
number of people with disabilities employed by the federal
government is lower now than it was in 1994, 1996, and 1998 and,
with outsourcing, it is likely to shrink further still.
To comply with the Executive Order, the government would have to
hire 2,800 new disabled workers every month of the next
President's term to meet the goal of 100,000 by 2009; that's
four years late!
We need a President who will take the hiring of disabled federal
workers seriously, and reach these targets on a timetable
against which they can be held accountable, because disabled
workers desperately need those jobs.
Fifth, the disability community should only support those
candidates who will change the federal policies that stop people
with disabilities from working.
The federal government is better at paying disabled people to
stay home than it is at granting the assistance they need so
they can afford to work.
People with disabilities in the SSDI system who earn more than
$800 a month at their jobs risk losing their benefits entirely.
Leaving the disability rolls and taking a job is a real roll of
the dice, even with the Ticket to Work Act. Businesses are
cutting back on health care, or terminating their plans
altogether, but rarely offer the scope and scale of benefits
that disabled people truly need. In effect, the health care
system in our country teams with the SSDI system to trap us at
home.
And even if we forsake work, Medicare and Medicaid programs are
being cut in Washington and at the state level, because of tax
cuts previously awarded by President George W. Bush to people of
great wealth.
We need a President who will change the tax and budget
priorities of this country.
The next President must reform the Social Security Disability
system to guarantee the right to work while assuring that people
who cannot work will get the income support and health care they
need.
We must have a President who will honor our desire to work.
My passion for expanding job opportunities for disabled
Americans is rooted in my life -- in the pain and personal
failure I felt when I was prevented from working -- and in the
confidence and ability to contribute I rediscovered when I was
finally able to find work once again.
When I graduated college, I had high hopes for the future. I had
a fairly successful academic career. I had been voted
"outstanding senior." And I had left my girlfriend to prepare
for life with the Jesuits as a priest.
Before entering the Seminary, I had to take a physical exam. I
saw the doctor on June 15th, 1964, my birthday. When it was
over, the doctor said he had good news and bad news. The
examination revealed something that would keep me from going to
Vietnam. The bad news was that I had epilepsy. Suddenly, my
future was in jeopardy; and, in very short order, my life was
upside-down.
Because Catholic canon law then prevented epileptics from
becoming priests, the Church took away my robes. The State of
California took away my driver's license. The insurance company
took away my coverage. And employers took away my power to earn
a living with the words: "Epileptics need not apply."
After so many defeats, I lost hope. Many days I was drunk by
noon; many nights I slept outside; many mornings I would wake up
and not know where I was or how I had gotten there. I was living
in a tunnel of hopelessness and the light was growing dimmer
every day. I became suicidal. I didn't know what to do or where
to turn.
I was lost until I learned I could channel my passion for public
service into the political process.
When I found Congress, I found myself, and with the help of a
great employer, Congressman Bernie Sisk -- with the support of
great friends and a loving wife -- I have enjoyed a long career
on Capitol Hill, in business, and beyond.
In the Congress, I had great opportunities -- to work for social
change, to serve the interests of my district, and to broaden
the base of my Party. Most importantly, I got to write ADA --
and see it signed into law -- and to begin returning to our
community the opportunities granted to me.
ADA has opened many doors for the disability community. But to
me, the most important door is the one that leads to America's
workplaces. Because I know -- coming from where I started and
arriving where I am now -- that everything else we want for our
lives depends on gaining greater work opportunities for the
disabled men and women of our country.
Some will tell us now is not the time. The security challenge is
too great. The economy is too weak. Our demands, however just,
must wait until the next election or a later day.
That is nonsense.
If the candidates say they can only handle a desk with in-boxes
labeled economics and foreign policy, they'd better get a bigger
desk, or we must demand and elect a better President.
This election has to be about our right to succeed... our right
to prosper and to pay taxes... our right to lead independent
lives... our right to provide for our families... our right to
advance... our right to the American dream. These are our goals
-- and we must make ourselves heard.
If we force these candidates to speak, clearly and directly,
about how they will take down our barriers to work, we will not
simply be heard, we will be respected. And if we force a change
in this campaign's debate, we will forever change national
policy toward the disabled, and we will permanently change our
lives and our nation for the generations that follow.
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