[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 108 (Thursday, July 25, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5956-S5958]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                    AMERICANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT

  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, tomorrow we celebrate the 23rd anniversary 
of the signing of the Americans With Disabilities Act, the ADA. This 
landmark civil rights legislation will always be the highlight of my 
almost 40 years here in the Congress.
  The Americans With Disabilities Act is one of the landmark civil 
rights laws of the 20th century; as someone once said, a long overdue 
emancipation proclamation for people with disabilities. The ADA has 
played a huge role in making our country more accessible, in raising 
expectations of people with disabilities about what they can achieve at 
work and in life, and inspiring the world to view disability issues 
through the lenses of equality and opportunity.
  In these times, it is valuable to remember passage of the original 
Americans With Disabilities Act was a robustly bipartisan effort. As 
the chief sponsor of the ADA here in the Senate, and as the chair of 
the Disability Policy Subcommittee at that time, I worked very closely 
with both Republicans and Democrats. At that time Senator Robert Dole 
was the minority leader of the Senate, and we received invaluable 
support from President George Herbert Walker Bush. Key members of his 
administration, such as White House Counsel Boyden Gray, worked so hard 
on this, as did Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, who was magnificent 
in his support for the Americans With Disabilities Act. Transportation 
Secretary Sam Skinner and other Members of Congress also played 
critical roles in passing the ADA.
  First and foremost among those, I would have to say, was Senator Ted 
Kennedy, who was chair of the full committee at the time and who 
allowed me to take the bill through as the chair of the Disability 
Policy Subcommittee. Senator Orrin Hatch played a key role at times, 
making sure we got the conservatives on the same page. Representatives 
Tony Coelho, Steny Hoyer, Major Owens, Steve Bartlett, and I might also 
mention someone who is not mentioned a lot, because he was not here in 
the Senate at the time we passed it, but who put in a lot of his life's 
work and who was chairman of that subcommittee before I took it over, 
Senator Lowell Weicker from Connecticut. As a matter of fact, he was 
the first sponsor of a comprehensive disability policy bill here in the 
Senate. So he became a great supporter, a great personal friend of mine 
through all these years, and Lowell Weicker deserves a lot of credit 
for actually getting us focused on the issue of a comprehensive civil 
rights bill addressing the issue of disability.
  Before the ADA, life was very different for folks with disabilities 
in Iowa and across the country. Being an American with a disability 
meant you couldn't ride on a bus because there was no lift, not being 
able to attend a concert or a ballgame or a movie with your family or 
your friends or loved ones because there was no accessible seating, not 
even being able to cross the street in a wheelchair because there were 
no curb cuts. In short, being disabled in America before the ADA meant 
not being able to work or participate in community life. Discrimination 
was both commonplace and accepted.
  Since then, we have seen amazing progress. The ADA literally 
transformed the American landscape by requiring architectural and 
communications barriers be removed and replaced with accessible 
features such as ramps, lifts, curb cuts, widened doorways, and--for 
anyone who is watching this on C-SPAN and put on the mute button--you 
get closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing.
  More importantly, the ADA gave millions of Americans the opportunity 
to participate in their communities. We have made substantial progress 
in advancing the four goals of the ADA: equality of opportunity, full 
participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency--the 
four pillars of the ADA.
  But I stand here today to remind my colleagues that we have not yet 
kept the promise we made 23 years ago with strong bipartisan support. 
We still have too many Americans with disabilities living in poverty, 
oftentimes in isolation and without control over the supports and 
services in their lives.
  For example, last week in my role as the chair of the Senate 
Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, we concluded an 
investigation and issued a final report on the state of the 
implementation of the part of the ADA that provides for people to be 
able to live and receive services in integrated settings, and prohibits 
people from being unnecessarily separated and isolated from their 
family and friends and put in institutions or other segregated 
settings. What we found is disturbing. Twenty-three years after the 
1999 Olmstead case decision by the Supreme Court, we found that more 
than 200,000 working-age Americans with disabilities--many in their 
late teens and early twenties--remain trapped in nursing homes and 
institutions, separated from their families and communities against 
their wishes--despite the 1999 Supreme Court decision in Olmstead v. LC 
that people with disabilities have the right to be integrated in the 
community.
  Our committee investigators found that only 12 States devote more 
than half of their Medicaid long-term care dollars to home and 
community-based services. The number of working-age adults in nursing 
homes has actually increased by more than 30,000 over the last 5 years. 
It is shameful.
  Unfortunately, many States continue to approach community living for 
people with disabilities as a social welfare issue and not as a civil 
rights issue. This is a failure of vision on the part of many State 
leaders.
  So how can we correct this injustice? Well, we need to clarify that 
under the ADA, every individual who is eligible for long-term services 
and supports has a federally protected right to a real choice--their 
choice--in where they receive these services and supports, whether in 
an institution or in a community.
  What that also means is, at long last, Congress needs to end the 
institutional bias in the Medicaid system. Right now, under Medicaid, 
States are required to pay for long-term services and supports if you 
are in a nursing home. But if you want to receive those supports and 
services in an integrated community-based setting, Medicaid has the 
option of covering you. That is the institutional bias that exists in 
Medicaid: They have to pay for you if you are in a nursing home, and 
they don't have to pay for supports and services if you are in a 
community or integrated setting. As long as it remains that way, the 
deck will continue to be stacked in favor of costly institutional 
settings. We know from our investigations that home-based, community-
based integrated settings with support services for people with 
disabilities is more cost effective than putting people in an 
institution or a nursing home--not to mention the quality of life, and 
the fact that so many people with disabilities want to be in an 
integrated community setting and do not want to be housed in a nursing 
home.
  In my remaining 17 months that I have as a Senator here in the 
Senate, I plan to hold hearings and introduce legislation that will 
accelerate the rate at which States move their long-term services and 
supports in the direction of home and community-based settings.
  Another area where our work is incomplete is making sure people with 
disabilities take their rightful place in the American workforce. 
Twenty-three years after the passage of the ADA, it is shameful that 
two out of every three adults with a disability are not even in the 
workforce, not working. That is shameful. We may say, Well, the 
unemployment rate in America is now 8 or 9 percent. Think about if you 
are a disabled adult; it is 60 percent or more who are unemployed.
  Next week in the HELP Committee, we will mark up the Workforce 
Investment Act, a critical law that has not been reauthorized since 
1998. The workforce has changed a lot since 1998, and a lot of the ADA 
generation have come of age during that period of time. So in the 
bipartisan draft Senators Alexander, Murray, Isakson, and I filed with 
the committee yesterday, we include provisions that will improve how 
the vocational rehabilitation system partners with schools to deliver 
services that will result in more young people doing internships, part-
time jobs, in competitive settings. The aim is to maximize the 
likelihood that young

[[Page S5957]]

people with disabilities will leave school college and career ready--
people such as Lily Siegel, who was my intern this summer from the 
American Association of People with Disabilities. They provide summer 
internships. Lily, and so many like her, have high expectations for 
themselves. They want to be challenged. They want to work in 
competitive, integrated employment. They don't want to be shunted into 
subminimum wage jobs with no future, no chance for advancement, no 
chance for challenging themselves to do better and to do more and to 
take more responsibility. We owe it to them to do everything in our 
power to help them transition to the kinds of jobs and higher education 
experiences that will help them build a career and maximize their 
economic self-sufficiency.

  I can tell you from my work in this area that this generation of 
young people who have come of age under the umbrella of the ADA, who 
were born in 1990 through 1995, has been integrated into their schools. 
They weren't segregated as my brother was and sent halfway across the 
State to a State institution. They have higher expectations. They have 
had accessibility. They see what society has done to make sure that 
they can travel, they can go out with their friends and their family, 
they can go to school in integrated settings, they can get jobs and, 
under the ADA, employers have to provide reasonable accommodations for 
that job. They don't deserve now to be frustrated by not having the 
opportunity to get that competitive integrated employment.
  That is what we are doing in the Workforce Investment Act, to provide 
for young people in high school who have disabilities, to let them know 
they expect more of themselves, and we do too. No longer will it be 
acceptable for them to leave school and go into some minimum wage 
covered employment where they are warehoused for the rest of their 
lives. They want to get out there and show what they can do. That is 
why we are changing the Workforce Investment Act, changing voc rehab to 
focus on getting these young people internships, job shadowing, 
mentoring, so they know what their abilities are and what they can 
expect to do once they leave school.
  When we passed the ADA, so many people came here from other 
countries--legislators, parliamentarians--how can we now do this? How 
can we get our laws changed?
  About 11 years ago, the United Nations set up a committee to look at 
this. Out of this came the U.N. Convention on the Rights of People With 
Disabilities, the CRPD. That treaty was sent to our President, and 
under our system the President sends it out to all his Departments in 
the executive branch to report back, what things do they need to do to 
change to conform to the treaty? In other words, if the treaty is the 
supreme law of the land, what laws do we have to change in order to 
comply with that treaty?
  Guess what. After about a whole year of circulating through all of 
our Departments of Justice, Labor, HHS, Agriculture, and everything 
else, it came back: We don't have to change one law because we are the 
best in the world when it comes to the civil rights protection of 
people with disabilities.
  So last year, under the guidance of then-Senator John Kerry, who is 
now our Secretary of State, it went to the Foreign Relations Committee. 
They had hearings. Senator McCain and I were the two leadoff witnesses. 
We brought that treaty to the floor of the Senate in December, fully 
expecting it would pass. Under the Constitution of the United States, 
it requires a two-thirds vote to approve the treaty and we thought we 
had the votes. We brought it on the floor. We fell 6 votes short of the 
67 votes we need. We had a number of Republicans and Democrats on the 
bill.
  Why did it fail? Right before we brought it up, former Senator Rick 
Santorum and others began to talk about how this was going to prevent 
people from homeschooling their kids. I thought I knew the treaty. I 
had read it. I had looked at it. I thought, Did I miss something? Is 
there something in there I didn't find?
  I went back to my staff and said, Comb through this. I got ahold of 
people at the U.N. and said, What is in there that would prevent people 
from homeschooling their kids? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That charge 
was made out of whole cloth somehow, but at that time in my office 
calls ran 50-1 against adopting the treaty on that issue. So people 
were misinformed because of a few people like Mr. Santorum and others 
who decided to whip this up--for whatever reason, I don't know.
  There were also a lot of comments made on the Senate floor by my 
Republican colleagues at that time that we shouldn't be adopting a 
treaty in a lameduck session, even though we pointed out that many 
treaties in the past had been adopted in lameduck sessions. I review 
that history to tell my colleagues that under now the leadership of 
Senator Bob Menendez, who is the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations 
Committee--and I might add that the person who succeeded Senator Kerry 
in his position in the Senate, the present occupant of the chair, is 
also on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee--there are going to be 
some more hearings. Under the leadership of Senator Menendez, we intend 
to bring that back to the floor this fall. We need to get the 67 votes.

  People ask: Why is that so important? It is important for the United 
States to take leadership on this issue around the globe. Over 100 
nations have already signed the treaty. They are looking to us for 
leadership.
  I have talked to some of my colleagues and they say: Why do we need 
to join that? We are OK. We are doing just fine. We are doing just fine 
with disability law in our country. We do not need to join this 
convention, sign this treaty.
  It seems to me that is an inherently selfish way of looking at who we 
are and what we are about as a nation. We have provided, I think to the 
world, guidance and direction on disability issues. If we are a part of 
the Convention, we get a seat at the table. When countries come and say 
we want to conform our laws, we want to make sure we meet the 
guidelines of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with 
Disabilities, this commission that is set up will be there to both 
guide and direct countries but also to see whether they are fulfilling 
their obligations. If we are not a signatory to the treaty, we are not 
at the table.
  There is another reason we should sign this Convention. I just spoke 
to a group of people yesterday, people with disabilities, and I said: 
There are a lot of people in this country who use a wheelchair. Guess 
what. They would like to travel overseas. They would like to go with 
their friends and their family. But in many of these countries they do 
not have curb cuts. They do not have lifts. They do not have 
accessibility for people with disabilities. Shouldn't people with 
disabilities in this country have the same right to travel and enjoy 
foreign travel as anybody else? If we are a signatory to the treaty, 
then we can work with those countries to help change their laws, change 
their structures.
  I cannot tell you how many veterans I have talked to, people who have 
come back from Iraq and Afghanistan disabled, and do you know what they 
say. They want us to join the treaty too because they want to travel 
overseas, and they feel constricted because they will not have 
accessibility in other countries.
  For the life of me I cannot understand why people are not supporting 
this treaty. I do not get it. I just don't get it. It is supported by 
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It is supported by every veterans group 
in this country. It is supported by, I think, every faith-based group 
in this country. It is supported by everyone in the disability 
community. It is supported by every former living President, from the 
two Bushes to Clinton, to Carter. It has broad-based support. You would 
think with that kind of support it would be a no-brainer to pass it in 
the Senate.
  We are going to bring it up again this fall. I am hopeful we can do 
it. No one worked harder on a lot of these issues than Senator Bob 
Dole. We just had his 90th birthday party Tuesday in Statuary Hall. It 
was quite an event. So we fell just six votes short. I look forward to 
working with Senators Menendez, McCain, Ayotte, Barrasso, Durbin, 
Udall, and Coons to bring the treaty back to the floor and get the 
additional votes needed for it to pass.
  I tell you, people with disabilities, their family members, 
supporters, the

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business community, the veterans community, faith-based and civil 
rights groups are mobilizing for this. They do not want to take another 
chance that this will not pass.
  I urge my colleagues to take the time to look at the facts related to 
the disability treaty. It requires no changes in U.S. law. It has no 
budget impact. As I said, when we become a party to the Convention, we 
have a seat at the table with the rest of the world. We will be well 
positioned to accelerate progress for the 1 billion people with 
disabilities around the world. It is our chance to be that shining city 
on the hill for the rest of the world.
  I might also add this is supported by the high-tech business 
community in America because their global leadership position on 
accessible products and services can be used by the rest of the world.
  For all those reasons, we need to pass it. Let me just close with 
this one last thought. Again, I am struck by the fact that these days 
we are surrounded, as I said earlier, with a new generation of young 
adults with disabilities who grew up since passage of the ADA, 
including a number of wounded warriors back from Iraq and Afghanistan. 
I call these younger people the ADA generation. They see disability as 
a natural part of human diversity. They reject the prejudices and 
stereotypes of earlier generations. I can tell you this, they have high 
expectations for themselves. They want to be challenged and they want 
to challenge us to make sure our society is open and they have the 
opportunity to go as far as their talents can take them.
  We cannot let these people down. If we passed the ADA, now we have to 
take steps to make sure it is not just a promise, but it is a promise 
we are keeping and that we will keep.
  We in the Senate have a responsibility to keep fighting to ensure 
that they have an equal opportunity to be independent, fully 
integrated, fully self-sufficient. That, at the heart, is what the 
Americans with Disabilities Act is all about. Twenty-three years later, 
we can look at it and say, without doubt, it truly is America at its 
very best.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah is recognized.

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