From ADA Watch and the National Coalition for Disability Rights:

Disabling the ADA, One Nominee at a Time

by Herb Levine

San Francisco Chronicle

Tuesday, March 1, 2005

In 1990, the first President Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act

and proclaimed, "Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling

down."

Fifteen years later, George W. Bush is apparently rebuilding that wall by

undermining the ADA through judicial appointments. Bush is nominating judges

who

are outspoken, if not radical, in their opposition to the ADA and the

protections for people with disabilities. In an ironic Republican twist, if

these

judges had their way, civil rights for people with disabilities would

regress, prohibiting full participation in society and putting more people

with disabilities

on government assistance.

A case in point is the nomination of Terrence W. Boyle to the U.S. Court of

Appeals in Richmond, Va. His confirmation hearings in Washington begin this

week before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, on which Sen. Dianne

Feinstein, D-Calif., sits. Were Boyle to be confirmed, it would further

erode the

protections people with disabilities have enjoyed under the ADA.

Boyle's record of decisions in U.S. District Court concerning the ADA is a

direct attack on the civil rights of people with disabilities; he has

consistently

ruled that the ADA is, in effect, unconstitutional. Many of his rulings are

based on radical interpretations of disability-rights laws, which are often

inconsistent with basic disability law and interpretations found in other

courts and government enforcement agencies.

Without the ADA, many people with disabilities would not get a chance to

become productive taxpayers and members of the workforce. Anyone who has a

disability

or knows someone with a disability knows of the discrimination that takes

place: from the woman who is blind and doesn't get a job because a potential

employer doesn't understand that she can do the job with computer software

to the paraplegic who can't serve on a jury because he can't get his

wheelchair

into the jury box.

Yet, to hear it from Boyle, the ADA is an evil entitlement program that has

nothing to do with civil rights. Boyle has gone so far to say that the ADA's

civil-rights significance is invalid, stating in Pierce vs. King in 1996,

"Although framed in terms of addressing discrimination, the Act's operative

remedial

provisions demand not equal treatment, but special treatment tailored to the

claimed disability."

This example is typical of how he has ruled against the validity of the ADA

and the protections people with disabilities have in fighting

discrimination.

Boyle joins Bill Pryor, a nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta,

and Jeffrey Sutton, who was confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals in

Cincinnati,

as activist judges who are being elevated to positions that will

significantly affect the civil rights of people with disabilities.

As confirmation hearings in the Judiciary Committee begin, it is imperative

for members of the committee, including Feinstein, to look beyond the

general

litmus tests of the hot-button topics of abortion and same-sex marriage and

to civil rights for millions of people with disabilities. If the federal

courts

continue to chip away at the ADA, there will soon be no ADA left to whittle,

reconstructing the barriers the first President Bush hoped to eliminate in

1990. What we would be left with is a whole segment of our population who

would no longer be active participants in society but would be encouraged to

wait for a handout, go to an institution and keep away from the rest of us.

A Boyle confirmation would relegate disability to the dark ages of the early

20th century, when access to public facilities was not a recognized right.

Erosion of civil rights in the U.S. Court of Appeals is erosion in civil

rights nationally. The ADA is, slowly but surely, increasing access by our

community

to education, jobs and a better life. Boyle, through his legal

interpretations, is working to stop that access.

Herb Levine is executive director of the Independent Living Resource Center

in San Francisco