"Coelho Speech on Disability & the 2004 Election"
 
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
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 fifteen 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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