Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Oppose the weakening of the Americans with Disabilities Act

Let's oppose the weakening of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This is personal for me, as it affects my immediate family. Two family members suffer from rheumatoid arthritis. Not to mention my late mother, who passed away in 1986 four years before the ADA was passed, and who spent many years on canes and crutches due to arthritis.

This explains the information about HR 620, which has already passed the House of Representatives. 

7 comments:

Kevin said...

Without being fully aware of all the facts here, looking at the ACLU site (and I'm generally skeptical of the ACLU, just for bias disclaimer) vs the bill summary on Congress.gov, the bill appears to not allow people to rush straight to a lawsuit unless they have first notified the business and given it a chance to remedy the problem without litigation. I see no problem with that, so either I'm missing something or the ACLU is fearmongering.

The ACLU says that people will have to jump through hoops to remove a barrier, but section 3 of the bill says that there must be "an expedited method for determining relevant facts related to such barriers and steps to resolve accessibility issues before litigation". Not to mention that a lawsuit isn't exactly fast, either.

I can't find any reference in the bill summary to protecting businesses from damage, nor anything about it being too hard to understand or lawyer fees.

Are the things the ACLU is warning about here contained in the actual bill perhaps? I'd rather avoid reading a Congressional bill if I don't have to.






Kevin said...

As another disclaimer, my father and my son are both disabled, so I am not exactly unsympathetic to protections for disabled people. I'm genuinely curious where the ACLU is getting its claims from.

One Brow said...

Go to the text, and evaluate for yourself:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/620/text

Kevin said...

The summary did a good job summarizing I suppose. I don't see how the ACLU's position is based in fact, so either I'm missing something or...

Victor Reppert said...

This is from the AADP (American Association for Persons with Disabilities) website. You can't call AAPD leftist in the way you might the ACLU (I personally don't like the ACLU lawsuits against Christian wedding providers myself, so I don't always side with the ACLU). The AADP, for example, is opposed to assisted suicide and fears, as I do, that assisted suicide, if legal, will become an excuse for insurance companies not to support end of life care for those who want to fight their disease as long as they can. But this a quote from AADP

Supporters of HR 620 will tell you the bill only makes minor changes to the ADA. Not true. HR 620 removes any incentive that currently exists for a business to comply proactively. This bill will reward those who have waited for a complaint to be filed by requiring someone like me to give the business owner what could be unlimited time to provide access. If this law is passed, business owners won’t face any penalty as long as a person with a disability goes through an elaborate notification process beginning with filing a very specific complaint with the business owner, wait 60 days for a response and another 120 days for removal of the barrier to access before going to court. After that, if the business owner claims he/she is making “substantial progress” toward access, whatever that means, the wait for access to that business may be a lot longer. Is this really what we have waited 27 years for? No, it is not.

https://www.aapd.com/tag/hr-620/

William said...

The ADA has problems in how it was applied to certain subgroups (certain ones that do not have a physical disability) but the changes in the bill does not fix those problems.

bmiller said...

You think it's tough to file a claim here.

This guy can't get the courts to rule that he's even alive!