Death Panel co-hosts, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Jules Gill-Peterson mark the 33rd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) with a discussion of just how limited the law is compared with how it's portrayed, how to understand the ADA as part of the broader story of welfare state retrenchment in the 1980s and 1990s, and the broader story of how it got this way.

Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)

Former President George H. W. Bush (Audio clip) 0:01

“And now I sign legislation which takes a sledgehammer to another wall -- one which has [clapping and cheering] -- one which has for too many generations, separated Americans with disabilities from the freedom they could glimpse, but not grasp. And once again we rejoice as this barrier falls, for claiming together, we will not accept, we will not excuse, we will not tolerate discrimination in America.”

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:05

Welcome to the Death Panel.

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Jules Gill-Peterson 1:40

Hey Bea.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:41

And today, the two of us are doing something a little bit different from a regular Death Panel episode. So I'm going to start us off a little bit differently because today, we're doing a special Death Panel history to celebrate the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act because today, the day that we're recording this episode, is Wednesday, July 26, 2023. And 33 years ago, on July 26, 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law by President George HW Bush in front of 3,000 disabled people on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington DC. And as he signed the bill, President Bush declared, "Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down." And then President Bush turned to disability activist, Evan Kemp, and kissed him on the top of the head and waved to the crowd. And that one is just my favorite odd, paternalistic detail that I had to throw in for trivia's sake.

Jules Gill-Peterson 2:36

[laughs] Yikes.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:37

Yes, big yikes. There's a lot about this history that listeners, as you'll soon learn, complicates I think our understanding of disability policy. So the Americans with Disabilities Act, also known as the ADA, is a landmark piece of disability legislation that is often referred to as the global gold standard of disability social policy. So the ADA was part of the template for the UK's British Disability Discrimination Act, which was actually passed five years after the ADA, which I want to emphasize, because I know we have a lot of listeners not just in the US, but also in the UK. And I think this conversation about how the Americans with Disabilities Act came to be exactly the way it was, is also really helpful for folks over there to understand some of the reasons that the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 and then the 2010 update called the Equality Act are the way they are as well. So today, on the 33rd anniversary of this law, we're going to revisit a really important part of the story behind the ADA's passage that you won't often hear about in popular accounts of this law and its impact. We're going to talk about why the ADA is considered to be a conservative law, and what that tells us about why the ADA has not materially help disabled people the way that it was promised to, why the ADA may have even in some cases made things worse, according to some scholars. So to do that, we have to look at how the law was sold, who was involved in shaping its passage and implementation, and what actually really united the coalition behind it, which was, most importantly, a universal commitment from all sides to welfare reform.

Jules Gill-Peterson 4:18

There's something really helpful about thinking about it this way, which is that it helps us decode a little bit, often a kind of dominant narrative around ADA, which is like this kind of bemused surprise, like, hey, how did this really progressive law get passed in 1990 by George HW Bush, and, you know, how did a non-discrimination act get passed in the 90s, you know, in the era where anti-discrimination is really becoming unpopular? And how did something that seems so progressive come about at the kind of height of the emergence of the neoliberal state? But if we look at the other big hot topic of the 80s and the 90s, which was welfare reform, all of a sudden it'll all snaps into place. So I'm really excited to come at it from this angle.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 5:04

Absolutely. And if you look at the kind of dominant narrative of like, why did the ADA pass in this context, where, you know, seemingly insurmountable odds, people had allegedly completely given up and had no interest in civil rights policy, and everything was sort of focused on fiscal drama, welfare reform, reducing the national debt, how did disability policy sort of shine through in that moment? And the story goes that it's because disabled people built a coalition that could not be ignored, that it was this incredible broad moment where, you know, from all angles, they brought people together, and they united people around a common goal. And that is true, right? The complication, however, is how was that goal sold? And what was that goal? And did everyone actually agree on what the goal was? And when you actually look at how the ADA was talked about, who was really involved in shaping the priorities of how this law was going to come together, you begin to see absolutely, that the goal here as it was stated, not just by Republicans and conservatives like HW Bush, you know, also by Democrats and liberals, but not just by lawmakers, by lawyers, by the courts, by disabled people themselves, by advocates, self-advocates, by folks on the sort of edges of the disability rights movement and folks on the center, at the helm of the independent living movement, they all united around the idea that disability policy was sort of suffering from being under the arm of the state, and that the ADA was going to be this transformative intervention, specifically because it was going to liberate disabled people. And the way that it was going to do that was through providing access to economic rights, and providing access to work and the economy. And that that would sort of flow into social rights and into full inclusion. And so the idea was basically, you know, that we could get folks what they wanted, which was equality, inclusion, access to society, we could give disabled people what we want, and we could also give lawmakers what they wanted, which is reducing the national debt, reducing the "burden" of welfare on the taxpayer. And how are we going to do that? By getting folks off welfare and into the workforce who are being held back by the disability sort of system. And so a lot of this comes from very specific rhetoric and a very specific historical moment. And I'm not sort of trying to just like recite the terribles and shit on the ADA [laughs]. It's actually -- you know, Jules, as you said, this is a really important part of this law. And it helps you make sense of why things are not the way we were promised. You know, when you hear people talk about the ADA, you would think that it's like a proactive kind of law, like that it's a commandment from on high and that there's an ADA police squad that goes around enforcing ADA violations and making sure people are compliant. I mean, the way that we talk about ADA lawsuits, for example, is always discussed in terms of disabled people imposing themselves on businesses and the state, demanding things, you know, there's so much about the rhetoric around the ADA, beyond just sort of how it was sold and how it was described in the moment of passage, but in the way that it's existed forward through history into our current era, that also bears resemblance and suddenly makes sense, when you look at things under the context of, you know, the ADA really exists in a policy landscape where welfare reform is hot. It is trendy, and it is rhetorically popular. But you know, it's not merely that this argument was used as a kind of compromise, or a noble lie, or a wedge, but the idea of welfare reform and this fundamental idea of the sort of dynamic that the ADA is supposed to produce being ultimately about inclusion as a kind of side effect of deficit reduction, you know, that has existed and continued to reverberate in all the ways that the ADA has continued to exist. And so it helps to both contextualize, you know, why there are so few places in the healthcare space that are accessible, particularly when we're talking about accessibility in terms of exam equipment, tables, MRI machines, and yet this is the law, right? It is the law that healthcare facilities must be accessible and that public schools and public spaces must be accessible but, you know, ask anyone who was in a wheelchair as a child, what they were told to do during a fire drill. They're gonna tell you, most often, they were probably told to sit at the top of the stairs in their wheelchair and wait to be rescued, while the rest of the building, while the rest of the children around them were evacuated. And these are the kinds of realities, right, where we have this idea that the ADA exists, and it prevents discrimination against disability. But it's not preventative, it's reactive. And looking at this from the perspective of welfare reform, helps us also understand how and why it ended up as a reactive law, not a proactive law, because it's very different from other civil rights laws and other anti-discrimination laws that sort of have a proactive mandate as to some kind of like pre-emptive prohibition. The ADA is actually very different than a lot of the other laws that came before it, and actually came after it as well.

Jules Gill-Peterson 10:50

Very well said. I mean, I have to admit, my shorthand for conceptualizing the ADA has always kind of come from my experience living in New York City, you know, using the subway system in which a tiny, tiny fraction of stations even have elevators. I remember after I moved to New York, I was like, okay, this seems terrible. Also just getting used to how terribly run the subway system is, and come to find out that the New York City subway system has a legal exemption from complying with the ADA, because the cost of bringing the entire system into compliance with the law is just, of course, on its face, too high. And so they have an absurd length of time to dither and pretend that they're getting the system to even just have like, elevators, right. And it's just like that kind of notion, right, I think is just one example. But yeah, I think what's so interesting to me, reflecting at this anniversary moment, is that so much seems bound up in people's perceptions of what they think the ADA was meant to or is supposed to do. And that seems to have kind of floated away maybe from what the people advocating for its passage, both in the congressional sense, and in the advocacy sense, were actually saying at the time, right? And so maybe just one marker for this broader like, what do we mean when we say welfare reform, just in terms of timelines, you can think of George HW Bush as the meat in a very unholy sandwich, where the bread is on the one side, Ronald Reagan, right. So you have two terms of Reagan, bringing to the fore, the kind of new policymaking of neoliberalism, incredible retrenchment of the welfare state, a huge pullback, through severe, severe cuts, right, to programs across the board, and huge tax cuts and other kinds of giveaways to the elite, and to the ruling class, and to corporations. So that's the bread on the one side. And on the other side of that bread -- I mean, Reagan did pass a welfare reform law. But you know, the guy who really got that job done comes after HW Bush. It was Bill Clinton's infamous welfare reform law, the one that, among other things, promotes heterosexual marriage, as opposed to public benefits. Had a really coercive kind of way of targeting, in particular, Black women, under that auspices. But those were two signal moments in which the very sort of purpose of the state fundamentally transformed. And we can sort of imagine the ADA sitting as the hinge between those two moments, helping to popularize a certain notion of welfare reform, but also giving it a little bit of an alibi, right? As a positive, as an affirmative, as an anti-discrimination protocol in and of itself. And I just think, these rare moments where a law is passed, and everyone is ideologically unified around it, right, not just Democrats and Republicans, but like politicians and civil society, right, like, those are the moments that always given me pause. I'm like well, hold on, wait, why does everyone like this, right? And finding out the reason why might sort of tell you a lot about what the law was actually designed to do. And so I think there's this bigger question for me that maybe we can get to in the course of our conversation, just about the uncomfortability for those of us on the left, at acknowledging the conservatism of some social movements, or the conservative -- I mean, truly conservative, small c conservative strain, particularly of 1970s onward kinds of social movements that emerge around social identities. You know, we could do a whole other episode on gay liberation and trans movements there, but certainly this kind of conservative, very American, individualist kind of form of a disability rights movement that played a pretty important role. So kind of understanding that sometimes the demand that is being then codified by a very conservative legislature, the demand itself can also be politically aligned with those politicians, right? So we're sort of -- it's an interesting moment of convergence, 1990, and one that we're still living out, which is really interesting, just to say, just to underline it, because there is this popular perception that the ADA has somehow failed, manifestly failed. And what people mean by that is really interesting. It seems empirically, like it actually largely has failed to secure access to employment in the way that it was promised to. But the idea that the law has overall failed or been made to fail, I think, seems to, from what I can tell, have a lot to do with sort of idealizing its purpose or sort of amending its purpose after the fact, and sort of distancing oneself from the welfare reform thesis, because if you take, you know, as axiomatic that the law is essentially a form of welfare reform, then it probably has been exemplary in its successfulness.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 16:06

Well, and one of the things that I think is often confusing about this is the fact that as you're saying, Jules, ADA is talked about as being a moment of -- it's almost like a moment where liberals come to their senses, and they reach across the aisle and the ADA passes in between these two pinnacles of welfare reform, where it's kind of like sometimes even I've seen it talked about by some political scientists almost as like a kind of point of potential corruption for Democratic lawmakers that, you know, you have all this collaboration between the conservative Republicans who were, you know, folks who were disabled people who worked in Ronald Reagan's administration, who then worked in the first Bush administration, who were the people who were writing this legislation that, you know, the kind of coalition building and across the aisle work that occurred, and the kind of permeation of the conservative ideals within the popular understanding of what the disability rights movement was, you know, I've seen it talked about as if that was a kind of moment of shift where it pushed the Overton window, it made it slightly more acceptable for Democrats to be making welfare reform arguments. And I don't know if I agree with that, frankly, because --

Jules Gill-Peterson 17:22

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 17:23

You know, looking back, you can find welfare reform arguments coming from Democrats, like as early as the 1930s, you know, I'm just thinking in my own notes right now, like, what's the earliest year I have? I think, '33. But you know, these are kind of ideas about it as a moment of aberration, right, that like this was a kind of a break in the progression of neoliberal policy. So I think before we get any further, I want to just make sure that we briefly do a quick overview of what the ADA is. So the ADA, as I said, on paper, as described, briefest 101 description, that the ADA is a federal civil rights law, that in theory is supposed to prohibit discrimination based on disability in a few very specific ways, under a few very specific relational and spatial contexts, which includes employment, public transportation, public accommodations, communications, like telecom, and access to state and local government programs and services. Now, as Jules mentioned, you know, as I said, public transportation is on there and yet, describe to me an American public transit system that's fully accessible, like maybe not, right. There are exceptions. And after the ADA was passed, there were a series of court decisions that limited it further and further. And so this is kind of, I think, where some of that narrative comes from that the ADA in theory was passed as a bill that was supposed to, you know, prohibit discrimination. And it was limited through the courts into something that was an aberration of what it was. But what we're really sort of arguing, and, you know, the scholars that we're pulling on here to argue are looking at is that actually, these court decisions that supposedly limited the ADA are in keeping with what the ADA actually says and in what it was supposed to do. So, you know, we're going to be talking through some of the shortcomings. But of course, don't get me wrong. This is a really important piece of disability legislation. But what is so fucking frustrating is that between the early 1960s and 1990, you had over 68, I think, pieces of federal legislation relating to disability passed that that were the result of tremendous organizing, as I said, you know, the truth of the disability coalition that brought the ADA to passage being really unprecedented within disability communities is 100% accurate, right. That this was super important, the formation of a political identity and a movement got all of these laws either implemented or passed. As we talked about in our history of Section 504, sometimes these laws were passed, and then regulators dragged their feet due to cost. And it's the disability rights movement that made sure that some of the laws that were passed and freaked out lawmakers who were austerity hawks actually made it into practice. But at the same time, what's really important to remember is that some of the ideology that was used to sell the ADA has resulted in structural harm and continued the legal oppression of disability. And I think one of the key things to know about the ADA is that in contrast to these older disability policies, right, which so many were passed, so many are passed, do you know how many have passed since the ADA? Like four.

Jules Gill-Peterson 20:52

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 20:53

So we also have to think of the ADA in the same way that we've talked about Medicare and Medicaid, in our Death Panel history of Medicare, as also being in some aspects, a kind of counterrevolutionary or a counterinsurgent force, where you have a legal apparatus that in its implementation, and through sort of the narrative around its passage and what it offers to the population can also sort of undermine momentum behind an organizing movement, behind something like the disability rights movement, for example. So one of the key things to know about the ADA is that so in contrast to all the older disability policies, which used very, very narrow definitions of disability, and were all more oriented around like a model of disability seen through the lens of medicalization, they were more located within things like rehabilitation bills, or Veterans Affairs bills, or disability specific welfare programs, the ADA was very different. And the ADA employed this very broad and actually intentionally vague definition of disability that we talked about on your very first episode as a full panelist, In Taxonomy We Trust. But so that the definition of disability that the ADA introduced, you know, the intention was to kind of make it broad, and then leave it to the courts to adjudicate violations on a case by case basis to kind of reflect, in theory, a social model approach to disability. But the way that the ADA works is by using what disability legal scholar Ruth Colker calls the reactive model of reasonable accommodation, basically, meaning that the ADA approaches accessibility reactively rather than proactively. So many people think, as we've said, that the ADA is a kind of like enforceable mandate, where places are required to be accessible. But what that idea hides is that often every moment of visible accessibility and public life that you've encountered has come as the result of a specific disabled person's accommodation request that either resulted directly from a court case, or from norms set by a major court decision. So that's really important to understand, is that the ADA requires individuals sue private entities, post injustice, which, as Colker explains, is in and of itself, as a design feature, a self defeating mechanism of the law's design, that then undercuts the intended efficacy of the law. And if you look to lawmakers' statements at the time, one of the things that was really being debated, and why this was put in place, was because they were worried about a kind of avalanche of lawsuits, because the built environment was so inaccessible, that there was concern that if this was made too overly favorable to disabled people, it would ruin the economy. Does that sound familiar to anybody listening, I mean? Ugh.

Jules Gill-Peterson 23:51

But it's also the perfect encapsulation or distillation of what makes this law eminently neoliberal as opposed to say, like a 1960s or 70s version, where there is, at that time, still a lingering whiff of the Johnson administration's Great Society fantasy, where the federal state is growing and making broad based, you know, painting with a broad brush, right, rebuilding, creating programs with large models that lots of people could access and maybe imagining somewhat more like totalizing transformations in the world, as opposed to a strictly individual model, right. So we're not going to reimagine public transit, you know, from start to finish as accessible in a way that would fundamentally change what transit is for everyone. Instead, we're going to rely on the individual, disabled people bringing individual lawsuits of one at a time, if they have the means, if they have the endurance, and the time, and the resources, and the access. Lol. And over time, maybe that will make a few adjustments. But then also, I think maybe hidden in that, right, is like the ADA encompasses public accommodation, right, government programs, but the workplace is in some ways, right, at the top of that hierarchy. So something like public transit is really only important under the ADA insofar as it allows disabled people to like take a bus to work, for instance, I think is the implicit idea there. And so then, to the extent that that cost of accommodation can be spread around too, right, obviously, the public transit cost is, in theory, supposed to be borne in some way by the public, by the state. But insofar as the purpose of that bus is to get someone to a workplace, then the cost of accommodation can be privatized there, by the employer, but then -- I mean, then, our fearful idea of cost kicks in, right. And we're like, well, how can we keep that cost as low as possible, so we don't bankrupt that employer and also don't bankrupt the public purse, right? So this idea that -- and I think we could talk a little bit about this as well, you know, part -- because I could see people being sort of like, well, hold on a second, why would you create the system, right, that basically suggests a whole bunch of lawsuits could create a whole bunch of new costs, both for public and private entities, isn't that the antithesis of welfare reform, or the antithesis of neoliberal statecraft? But I think part of what this model is responding to, not just in its narrowness, but more broadly, is a fear that prior to this moment that somehow disabled people "cost" society, our favorite collective noun, cost society too much money, right, that by not getting on a bus and going to work, by not privatizing and spreading around that cost, by imagining disabled people as entirely dependent on society, whatever society is supposed to mean, that that is too expensive already. And so moving to this privatized model, with very narrow, kind of judicial based process is itself a form of cost reduction. But I wonder if you could like tell us a little bit more about that. What is this sort of overriding anxiety, which I think is just a broader reaction to the welfare state, right? It had been brewing since the 1930s, but maybe especially since the 60s, you know, and it's not just conservatives, right, who are like, everyone has become dependent on the state, and they're just lazy and don't do anything anymore, because you can just cash huge checks from Uncle Sam. But there's a way that, you know, maybe with the exception of the anti-Black racism encoded in welfare reform, besides that, I feel like, yeah, disabled people receive the most kind of vitriol in that kind of welfare reform imagination.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 28:01

Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is definitely dependent on the historical context in which the disability rights movement arises. As you're saying, there's so many movements that we can look to that maybe they're getting started in the 1960s. But if you're looking at the disability rights movement, the major victories really begin in the 70s. So a lot of people will often date the disability rights movement to the 70s, though it predates it, to self advocacy that's going on in institutionalized settings. So actually, if we're looking at like, where's the origin point of the disability rights movement, it comes from the self advocacy movement, which is through the deinstitutionalization movement. And that's sort of why we talk about that era so much on this show, because it's really important to remember that, you know, when disabled people start organizing in the United States, they are organizing to be released from residential institutions, whether that's psychiatric, anti-asylum organizing, because until some of the coalitions later on, closer to when the ADA was passed, these were all separate movements. You had -- actually, you had these movements working against each other in many contexts during the era of deinstitutionalization, where you have movements for psychiatric liberation saying, well, we don't belong in asylums, like with all of these sick people, and what we would now say as developmentally disabled or intellectually disabled people, you know, like, we're just crazy, like, we can be productive and live in society. Like we're not sick. We're not, you know, permanently, incurably always mentally impaired or something. And then you have folks on the other side of it saying, look, I'm just physically disabled. I'm not intellectually disabled or crazy, or, you know, I'm just disabled, I'm not crazy and dangerous, like those people in the asylums, I deserve to be out, I deserve employment, you know, I deserve access to my community and public life. And so when you're thinking about, okay, your life exists within a total institution, right? And one of the reasons why you're held there, and why you're told you can't leave is because you are under this medicalized supervision. And oftentimes, what's going on is that whatever public benefits you have, you're kind of this pass through asset, right? This is part of why we talk in Health Communism about the idea of extractive abandonment, because what happens, right, is that the folks who are in asylums, like their benefits, their Medicaid benefits, any cash in kind benefits that they have, often go into the institution and sort of pay for the cost of care in some respects, supplementing other state funding. So like a lot of these institutions, by the 70s, have turned into these kind of like Medicaid extraction points, right, where Medicaid gets going and gets stood up in the early 60s, and immediately there starts to be experimentation waivers. Can we try this? Can we try that? And by the mid 70s, you see lawmakers saying, okay, well, all of these institutions are falling apart, the states are all bankrupt, right? They don't have money to fix any of this stuff. The people inside say, let us the fuck out, and have been saying let us the fuck out for 20 years. And you know, we've promised over and over in various venues that we would, and we still haven't, so maybe we need to start doing something about this, right? And so that's part of where sort of the origin story of the disability rights movement then gets started, is like in that moment, in the 70s, where you see organizing coalesce around the implementation of Section 504, around the independent living movement, around sort of what happens 20 years into what's already been this sort of, you know, century -- in the case of psychiatric and asylum organizing, centuries of revolt and revolution from within the walls of institutions, right? So you have this entire prior history, right, that often kind of gets erased. And what is often talked about as the beginning of the disability rights movement, really is contextually taking place starting in the late 70s, in the mid 70s. And so you have the context of states like New York, declaring bankruptcy and being abandoned by the federal government, by the federal government saying we don't care if the state of New York can't pay its bills, it's on them. That is part of sort of the attitude of the 70s. It's a moment where the economic valuation of life explodes in popularity, conservatism flourishes, you know, we see neoliberalism specifically emerge in this context of discussion around the national debt, around what we owe each other as citizens and around, you know, how public money is being spent in a way that is fucking disgusting. I mean, like, you know, the kinds of attitudes of like, the negative perception and stereotype of the welfare queen, of the person on the public dole, you know, draining the taxpayer and future generations. We see these narratives get stood up in the 70s. And so what we're also looking at here, I think, and it's important to contextualize that, as sort of the history of how some of the organizing that directly results in the ADA gets started, because, obviously, the narrative going into the 80s -- the first draft of the ADA is written in 1986. The organizing around it is late 70s, early 80s, the narrative is like, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut federal spending, you know, we can't afford this, we can't afford that. And so, I think that there is a kind of a-ha moment, and you really see in what's going on in the Section 504 protests, that the thing that has held up the implementation of Section 504 for so long, through three different presidential administrations, right -- you know, this thing is passed in 1974. It's not until 1977 that it's implemented and you have, like everyone from Republicans to Democrats saying, like, ah, I don't think we can give people this thing that we already wrote into law, because it's gonna cost way too much fucking money. So that's also the kind of origin point is that immediately, when disability rights organizing starts getting involved in trying to influence legislation, they are immediately up against the rhetorical frame that their lives are too costly, and that inclusion in the community is too costly, and that accessibility is too costly. And it's also happening amid challenges to state welfare programs, amid attempts to defund things, amid discussions around problems with the Medicare trust fund, problems with the trust fund of the disability insurance program, problems with not having enough money to pay benefits, and also discussions around moral vice leading to disability that people could be blamed for, right? So I think it's important to not just say like, well, you know, fuck those guys for framing their movement in terms of assimilation into capitalism, and framing their movement in terms of wanting to assert themselves as good, productive citizens, and pushing the subaltern and the margins further to the margins and leaving them behind. Like, you know, I think that policy ideology is always about iterations on prior existing legal frameworks, right? Like, it's about building on existing ways to solve problems. And that, in and of itself, is an inherently conservative phenomenon, right? Like policy is a conservative phenomena. And when you start working with policy, if you're not explicitly coming in saying, like, you know, I need to approach this with a kind of final horizon in mind that includes these hard lines, it's very easy to see the advantage of leveraging a certain rhetoric, a kind of ends justify the means perspective. And then when you mix in the fact that a lot of these organizers were folks who were coming from really wealthy families, like Justin Dart, Jr., grandnephew of the guy who founded Walgreens and the father of the ADA, as he's called, you know? This is one of the best known disability rights activists in the United States. He is a conservative. He is a hardcore fiscal conservative, right? And disability is embraced not just by liberals, and that's something I think we forget, but it's embraced by conservatives early, because, you know, these arguments that folks who are on demeaning, fucking -- I mean, I'm on social welfare programs, they make you feel like shit, they're paternalistic, it's invasive, you know, there's no privacy. Your life is controlled, your options are limited, you know, so they're reacting to the ways that our carceral social welfare programs make people feel. And in reaction to that, some of the rhetoric that's then instilled in the movement, from the very beginning, is that same sort of conservative ideology that we see around independence, around self sufficiency, personal responsibility, the idea of the dignity of risk. And so the ADA is really framed as well, you know, we just want to be treated like everybody else. We're not asking for anything above and beyond what everyone else has. We just want to be subjected to the dignity of risk, just like everyone else, and be freed from the paternalistic thumb of the state. And so that was so attractive to conservatives. And when you have a group of people who, you know, at the time, starting at the beginning of the disability rights movement, you know, so many people who are in this movement have no income, right, or they're living in an institutional facility, they have no freedom, they have no power. And so you have to really rely on the kind of political allies you're able to make. And I think, the kind of economic extraction and sort of refusal to give disabled people academic resources, and their reliance on outside funding in collaboration with existing political movements, and powerful people, I think, ultimately does kind of propel and help accentuate some of these conceptual, conservative ideological points, like that the problem with disability is that we spend like X billion dollars a year on welfare programs, and we could save all this money if we could just make the workplace accessible. But the problem ultimately is, is that, you know, disabled people wanted independence, and they were given that in terms of like, a theoretical point of access for enfranchisement in capitalism, but that's one that's, as we've been saying, sort of wholly mediated through the courts. And as Ruth Colker writes about in her great reactive model of reasonable accommodation piece, like the actual statutory language of the ADA is in and of itself, super, super, obviously, an overtly capitalistic language. The idea is that -- the core idea of the ADA is that disabled people are entitled to something called reasonable accommodation, and that reasonable accommodation is a subjective and contextual, singular and individualized measure, right? And every single instance of a claim for ADA rights and accommodations needs to be examined for whether or not that requested accommodation is reasonable, or a burden. And employers, public entities, states, transportation systems, businesses, the ADA text says you're allowed to ignore the inaccessible nature of your facility, your activity, whatever, until an individual with a disability seeks or begs you for access. And that was the fundamental framework that was being set up.

Jules Gill-Peterson 40:38

Yeah. Wow. Wow. Oh my goodness. That was magisterial, and I'm a little in awe. But you're entirely right. And, you know, you go back and look at the legislative context in which the law was passed. And it seems like the favorite lines that disability advocacy organizations, sort of think tanks writing reports, and then the lines that get picked up and parroted by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers is, you know, they're all sort of made up numbers, but of course, made up numbers are the most compelling numbers, things like we currently spend $60 billion a year, a kind of invisible $60 billion a year. They don't literally mean just like SSDI payments or something. It's just like, you know, all this money that's being used to foster the dependency of disabled people, you know, we can really cut that number down if we pass the ADA, because those programs will wither to the extent that people are making use of this individual, juridical, privatized, you know, sort of quasi judicial non-discrimination pathway to getting access to the workplace, for them, their wages will, over time, replace the benefits they were receiving. And because the entire ADA is set up to make accommodations as rare, and narrow, and inexpensive as possible, that that sort of bargain, that that mathematics works out well for everyone involved, right? So it has certain public-private partnership written all over it. But I really -- I love -- so that's sort of like what happened, you know, in the immediate moment where the law was passed, but I just so appreciate you giving this long account of what it took to get there. And maybe, you know, part of what -- I was thinking of how to call this, the kind of unholy alliances, that just sort of become facts over time, when there are just these convergences of endpoint interests or surface interests, and one group has a lot more power, money, time, and institutional access than the others. And this just seems like a problem inherent to political representation. I was thinking of a lot of similar -- a lot of similar cases that I'm thinking about in my own research on, say, homophile gay organizing in the 50s and the 60s, and some of the earliest trans organizing, where you have the same sort of situation where there is a new identity group forming, and that identity group is starting to be recognized by the state and the public, as tangible in some way. And of course, that papers over so many of the intramural disagreements and class antagonisms and hierarchies of race and gender, and you know, all of these things that are not actually unified on the inside, but when it comes to a kind of strange convergence of interests, right, I think just to underline part of what you were saying, I think it's so illustrative, understanding that, you know, people who have been organizing, the anti-psychiatry movement had been organizing and trying to get out of total institutions that were essentially incarcerating them, right, potentially indefinitely, and to secure a basic, basic exercise of freedom by being able to get out of those situations, right, that some of those people saw that freedom or that exit plan as dependent on pathologizing other people who should remain institutionalized. But then in any case, you know, there's a way that probably the people -- like there's some segment of people who do, through deinstitutionalization, find that they're finally able to go into community, but precisely at this moment where the neoliberal logic is ascendant, go out into the community, institution gets sort of torn down because it's too expensive, the states can't afford them anymore. But in its stead, there's ostensibly nothing, right, you're just sort of cut loose into American capitalist freedom. But then for sort of more middle class or for disability advocates and disability rights activists with more resources and clout, who then obviously are able to put in more of the time and do the liaising with institutions of power and become the face of a movement, they start speaking for, right, groups that are more marginalized. And when we get to the sort of moment of the ADA, it's the ones who are more able to speak in the lingua franca of American politics, and to spend time talking to congressional leaders, and who are able to present their version of disability in a way that's more palatable, that are going to win out, but they get -- they get -- confer political representation of everyone. And so that's why this middle class welfare reform version might win out, even if not everyone in the deinstitutionalization movement is asking for welfare reform, right? They might have been asking for a much more radical redistribution of society that would enable their flourishing, rather than just having the institution taken away, right, and then replaced by work. But those people, that segment, don't have the same access to the halls of power, but now, someone who's saying I represent those people. And I think of it as a similar way, you know, but I think we see this pattern, repeated time and again, you know, looking back at other movements, say even the trans movement, you know, the kind of middle class advocacy activism, that's like, let's make sure the police know what a trans person is, rather than let's not have police harassing us. Or let's work with the doctors who pathologize us and make sure that when we transition, it's to get married, and to get good jobs. Part of what their duty, of course, is trying to win those games on the backs of those bad trans people who don't do that. But actually more than that, they're also earning, trying to claim political representation of those bad trans people, the sex workers, the ones who are doing transition DIY on the streets, the ones who aren't straight, et cetera, et cetera. So there's also this kind of mechanic here, where I think part of what we can see really clearly with the ADA is the way that a middle class kind of bourgeois version that's best equipped to interface with the heart of the political state - Congress, the courts, welfare reform, of course, that's going to reward the most conservative disability rights activist because like, frankly, no one's going to be listening to anyone else. But part of what's happening is those conservative disability rights activists are also gaining, in theory, the kind of political representation of all disabled people, and that's part of this process that I think -- I don't know, I just was really kind of trying to see how we got from the 70s, to the 90s. You know, in the 70s, things feel a lot more open ended, there's a lot more disagreement, there isn't as much political unity amongst disabled people, or amongst disability rights and different movements. But if the independent living kind of version rises to the top by 1990, that says a lot more just about the thrust of American living conditions and the state overall, which is not just that Americans like words like independence, but that the whole model of independent living, is really supposed to replace the welfare state for everyone in a broad conceptual sense. So it shouldn't be super surprising to us either, that even if more redistributI've, more left disability rights models and just disability activist models remain, the one that gets codified, the one that people hear in Congress and say back is, oh, they told me we're spending $60 billion dollars a year, we got to get that number down. Oh, and anti-discrimination. Woo-hoo. Like what, it's totally buy one, get one free day, across the ideological spectrum.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 48:47

I mean, it's like going to conservatives and saying, listen, you can get welfare reform and points for not being evil and giving disabled people freedom.

Jules Gill-Peterson 48:55

Yeah. They never get that [laughing].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 48:56

You know, and that's a very persuasive offer, you know? And some people may be like, well, compromises are compromises. And yeah, like, sometimes the things that are on the chopping block in a compromise are fucking materially harmful, and sometimes not helpful, you know? And I think one of the best ways to sort of understand what the number -- you know, so of course, this isn't the only way the ADA is sold, right. But this is not like one person, one place, one time said the ADA will be cheaper, and we're fixating on that in order to sort of extrapolate some broad interpretation of the ADA. We're going to be going through some receipts soon that give you a better idea of just how fucking pervasive this was. But to just sum up what the ideology is really quickly, the best way to sort of condense what the welfare reform argument is for the ADA is that the continuing -- and this is to quote -- this is actually a quote from a judge, from an ADA decision in the Vande Zande case, which is like a very famous ADA case, that kind of affirmed the idea that the ADA markets itself -- literal quote, markets itself, as a cost saving measure. So the judge, Judge Posner, in that decision, wrote, "The continuing existence of unfair and unnecessary discrimination and prejudice costs the United States billions of dollars in unnecessary expenses resulting from dependency and non-productivity." Now, so that's so important to understand, is sort of what that big marketing point, as Judge Posner, in his legal opinion, he's saying that the ADA has marketed itself as being about proposing a solution to the problem of "wasted money" on unproductive dependency that could be translating the surplus population and human waste, reclaiming them for the industrial army into workers, if only we were able to basically educate employers through legal action that they need to make reasonable accommodations. But again, it's really important to go back to Ruth Colker's point, that also in this model, the flip side of that is that it is saying, it is totally fine to just fucking ignore accessibility until someone begs you or sues you. And so that is also setting a very powerful and materially harmful precedent, right, which is that you need means to access your right to work. And if you don't have a right to work, you know, if you can't find employment and pay your own way, like you're fucked in the United States, right? And so it really has this kind of dangerous implication that often goes unsaid in the sort of broader agenda of fixing unnecessary prejudice and inequality in order to reduce dependency, right? I think it's a really important lesson in sort of why these frames are not things we want to pursue. And this also, Jules, I really appreciate the way that you laid that out, in the response, to focus really on power and the analysis of power in this situation, because -- you know, and don't take it from us. I've got a quote here that I want to read from Nancy Ward, who is a self advocate, who was involved in the disability rights movement, in the ADA fight, a lot of Nancy's work was specifically around students who are intellectually disabled, being separated out into separate educational tracks. And this is a quote from her oral history, from Fred Pelka's book, What Have We Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement. So Nancy says:

"When we first started self advocacy, and it's definitely not this way now, so I hate to say it, but there was a pecking order within the disability community and people with a cognitive disability were on the bottom of that order. And so nobody wanted to associate us. We had Justin Dart, [father of the ADA] come to one of our national conferences, and he saw what people with a cognitive disability could do. I asked him, 'You didn't think that we would be able to put on a big conference like this, did you?' And he said, 'No.' And so even somebody as high as that, who wants to work with people, still has that preconceived idea. We did a lot with the ADA. We did rallies, we got people to understand what the Americans with Disabilities Act is, and we also pressured the senators and representatives. We attended conferences, and the people who worked on ADA nationally taught us ways to do different things. Like how to lobby, except we call it 'educate.' And they taught us how to do rallies. They taught us a lot of different things. When we were in Washington for the ADA, we also did the ADAPT rally."

Nancy's talking about the Capitol Crawl here, where disabled people, to demonstrate the sort of structural inaccessibility, a lot of physically disabled people kind of gathered at the steps of the Capitol building, left their mobility devices on the ground floor, and physically crawled up the steps. There are some very iconic images of this protest. So that's what she's talking about here. So she says:

"When we were in Washington for ADA, we did the ADAPT rally. Of course, ADAPT is radical, so there were a lot of things that were radical going on. One of the things that I think was ironic was that when people were hauled off, the jail was inaccessible. And so they had to put people in a parking garage. And I thought that was pretty ironic."

She then says:

"I would like to see the ADA have more teeth. And I'd like to see it define accessibility to help people with cognitive disabilities, meaning that accessibility doesn't always mean a ramp. It could mean that people need to understand something. My point being that you can ask us the same things, but put it in language that we understand. It could be that people need to have signage to find something because it's hard for them to navigate things. So different things like that. And the accessibility part of the ADA doesn't have that, and I wish we would have spoken out more when it was being passed."

So as you're saying, Jules, like the idea that it was a universal coalition of disabled people all calling and clamoring each one of them, for welfare reform, is wholly inaccurate. But those in power, right, people like Justin Dart, who were writing and crafting the legislation, you know, part of the rest of Nancy's oral history, she talks about how the way that a lot of the self advocates that she was working with even sort of got involved in the ADA stuff is after they confronted Justin Dart at the conference and asked him like, you didn't think we could do this, did you? And he was like, no, I didn't. And they pressured him, and he gave them a seat at the table and brought them into these ADA organizing fights. And you know, in his defense, he listened to them, right. But at the same time, you know, Justin Dart had so much power over these advocates, right? Like these advocates met Justin Dart by convincing him that they could organize, that they could do something that he did not think that they could do, right, and did not believe, even in all of his sort of disability perspective and his disability lived experience and his identity, you know, his lived identity, and understanding of disability was that he was different than them, right. And that is the context of the beginning of their relationship. So to imagine the kind of power imbalance there, right, like Nancy says, like, intellectually disabled people, we were on the bottom of the order of disability, no one wanted to associate with us. So like, what power do people like Nancy really have in the situation to assert, like the sort of framework of the ADA doesn't accommodate me. And I think that that's really important to also consider part of what has gone on here is that, you know, disability scholar Marta Russell, the Marxist disability scholar, calls the ADA a free market civil rights law. It was written by free market conservatives, it was sold as a way to reduce dependency and dangerous idleness and unproductive human waste, and reclaim them for the capitalist order. And in it, it reflects fundamental ideas about people who can't work. Like for example, while there is nothing technically texturally within the ADA that says, if you are on SSDI, you cannot assert your rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act, that is how the courts have functionally interpreted it. And the reason being, that the definition of disability used by Social Security Disability Insurance is about someone's inability to work, and the definition of disability in the ADA, while expansive and intentionally vague, because the law is oriented around economic rights through access to work, equal social rights, equal right to accessibility, the definition of disability is inclusive of the idea that that person, but for reasonable accommodations being withheld or lacking, could perform the duties of their job, right. So the idea is if there's a reasonable accommodation that can be made, then that person qualifies as disabled under the ADA, because they have a disability, it limits their ability to work, but with reasonable accommodation, they could be a valuable, productive, non-dependent, non-wasteful, non-eugenic burden, non-surplus class, valued worker, right? And that that was sort of how we were going to negotiate and demonstrate -- negotiate accessibility and demonstrate the value of disabled people. And this was really kind of the conceptual idea that people like Justin Dart are really coming into the design of the ADA, you know, keeping that in mind. And it's also important to remember that this is an idea that was presented as being for this enormous coalition that included people like Nancy, right, and yet, I question what, if any, power, Nancy had to shape what that framework was going to be and how intellectual disability was going to be talked about, because part of what was going on in part of -- part of the, I think, endless frustration with the ADA is that a lot was promised and a lot was sort of sold and marketed, and it didn't necessarily have the needs of disabled people in mind, right. But the way that it was talked about, I think, made a lot of people think that the problem was solved. So it's a kind of -- it's a frustrating and difficult anniversary, right? Because you have this law, right, which you don't want undone, but which has prevented better things, seemingly, from happening after it, and which has resulted not necessarily in any of the things that it promised, whether you agree with them or not.

To talk specifically about the the sort of employment point, I'm going to read here from a 2005 paper from Michelle Maroto and David Pettinicchio, from Disability Studies Quarterly, called Twenty-Five Years After The ADA: Situating Disability In America's System Of Stratification. So they write:

"In the United States, the employment, earnings, and subsequent economic wellbeing of persons with disabilities have generally declined since the 1970s. This occurred even after the enactment of the Rehabilitation Act in 1973, which provided antidiscrimination provisions regarding employment in the public sector and agencies receiving federal government contracts. In fact, the only time that people with disabilities appeared to improve their economic situation was in the 1960s when the gap between workers with and without disabilities narrowed. Real earnings for persons with disabilities rose between 1962 and the mid-70s, but began to plummet after 1976. During that period, real earnings among people with disabilities decreased along with disability transfer payments, leading to an overall decline in economic wellbeing. Thus, employment rates began to decline well before the ADA was enacted, and continued to decline throughout the 1990s, despite the economic expansion during this period."

So not only, you know, as the ADA passed in 1990, but in the early 90s, SSDI is actually expanded and the qualifications of who can apply for disability benefits is actually expanded. And so in theory, both of those things should have resulted in "economic equality," or a slight improvement in the economic conditions, the class conditions of disabled people writ large. And, you know, there were attempts to kind of fix this. There's a 2008 amendment to the ADA. Still, there is little demonstrated evidence that the market idea of the ADA, that you could simply replace the cost of the welfare state through productive earnings by allowing disabled people to negotiate for their access needs, using the court system, turns out, like appears to not be true, and appears to not work. And I think that would surprise no one that, you know, is used to being fed that neoliberal market ideology bullshit, that really all you need is competition and access to capital in order to secure a non-brutal, non-cruel life, not merely bare minimum survival. And fundamentally, you know, I think that lie, that kind of good life fantasy, covers for so much, and oftentimes is kind of what's going on here, when we see people really hold on to the ADA as the promise that it had,as the promise that it sold people. And in being so committed to that fantasy of the ADA, being unable to realize some of the more harmful material impacts that the ADA not only naturalizes, but literally enforces, in terms of especially thinking about the ways that it sort of differentiates and separates disabled people into two classes of disabled people - working people who can access their rights via the ADA, and non-working people on SSDI. And for folks who have had an ADA claim in the courts and been out of work, right, because everything's retroactive, it's all reactive. Let's say they're applying for SSDI in the meantime, how have the courts perceived them? Well, they've accused them of fraud, intentional manipulation, abuse of the system, abuse of the judicial system, trying to seek things they don't deserve. I mean, you know, the whole ideology of waste and the justification of abandonment that we talk about throughout Health Communism, is very much inspired by, I think, observations of some of these kinds of opinions that we still see after the ADA, which were these initial points of kind of conceptual break, where Artie and I were looking at these decisions going, okay, so this landmark disability rights case reads like fucking Malthus, why? Why does this landmark decision in disability legal history make a move that looks like the British Poor Laws, right? Like, why, how is that possible, right, if this is a liberal piece of legislation, that "liberated" disabled people? I mean, let's talk about the way it was sold for a second, right? Let's talk about some of the ways that it was discussed. Senator Tom Harkin called it the "Emancipation Proclamation for people with disabilities." Senator John McCain called it the "final proclamation that the disabled will never again be excluded." Right. As I said, President Bush when he was signing it way at the top, he said, "Let the shamefall wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down." There, he's making a reference to the Berlin Wall, by the way, which had just come down the year prior. So he's saying, you know, passing this [laughs] is a kind of disability moment in history, right. And it has been received as such and reproduced as such, since its passage. Has it provided any of the things that I just listed that were promised? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And there's a lot of despair that I think comes from that, and feelings of letdown and frustration that people can't locate, and can't understand historically, or materially, because we're so used to talking about the ADA as the greatest success, and as something that we can never possibly, you know, talk about as having problems or needing to be better, because it's also thought about as a kind of policy under threat. That we have to stay unified, we have to retain this kind of position on the ADA, lest it be attacked. And that, I think, is ultimately what the gamble has always been, and why there's always been so much pressure to talk about the ADA as only a positive thing, as only a good thing, and to really kind of push its limitations and its material harms under the rug.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:06:13

Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I can imagine that a lot of the way people experience the fallout of all of this is intentionally indirectly, in the agony of administrative burden, you know, in a never-ending series of paperwork filings, being investigated, being subject to review, right, just waiting, long periods of waiting for something to happen and having to get by in the meantime. And, you know, just sitting with the real -- the real profundity of this point, that the signature purpose of this law, which was essentially to get people to work, that it just never did that, at any time, it has never done that. And in fact, though, I think, some of what that paper in Disability Studies Quarterly helps bring to mind too, is that the ADA isn't even necessarily the primary engine of historical change here. And that's sort of, I think, also a kind of despairing point too, which is to say that if real earnings for people with disabilities start falling in the mid 70s, like so long before the ADA is passed, that should really give us pause, right, and the ADA certainly has no impact on that, no positive mitigating impact on that, but it also didn't cause it either. So, you know, I think this is also one of these places where I was really, you know, in prepping for this episode, really, really leaning on the work that you too did in Health Communism to make better sense of this, right? Like, okay, so this law didn't really do what it promised, you know, does the state care, right, but there's a bigger story, there's a longer arc here, right? And we can say, oh, the mid 70s. Well, that's interesting, because all working Americans start to see a decline or stagnation in wages in the mid 70s. So, in that sense, disabled people are part and parcel of a broader historical shift, where we're seeing the cost of living go up, while the real value of wages stagnates or declines, having to work longer hours, having to work in more productive, more labor intensive, skill intensive, education intensive sectors, you know, just to keep up a minimum standard of living, or the need for at least two incomes to float a household ideally, right. And so we can sort of see on the one hand, the way in which the story of disabled people's labor actually does fit into a much larger history, political economic history, but also maybe start to think about the way that welfare reform targeting disability is a sort of leading edge of statecraft, to help normalize a decline in standard of living, and the precarity of wage labor more broadly throughout the population. And clearly, some of that is getting going in the 70s. And maybe the ADA is just sort of a culminating moment, a kind of codifying moment, right, that cements certain trends, names them, slaps some PR and infrastructure onto them. And then, you know, that sort of becomes a reference point. But really, yeah, underneath just the thud of reading that paragraph and sitting with the truth of the question, the actual empirical data on employment, right? There's an even larger and even more upsetting, but really important story, I think, about the way that targeting, or naming, or positively incorporating certain groups of people into statecraft is a way to remake political economy more broadly. And I just think that that kind of, to me, I kept sort of seeing the connection back to Health Communism and, you know, to the role of surplus population, in relation to other spheres of wage labor. And the kind of threat of, you know, being thrown -- that any worker with a wage right now, could at any time be thrown both into the byzantine labyrinth of evil that is trying to get any benefits, but also could be basically thrown into the situation where, yeah, to get out of that situation, you have to try and get back to work, right? You can just see sort of the mechanics, the groundwork being laid, for the really precarious conditions under which people, broadly speaking, labor today, but also the way that disabled people are getting like -- are being dealt the absolute worst hand in this broader historical process, right. And so, it's not -- I'm not implying any equalizing reading here. On the contrary, really pointing out the discrepancy there, I think, helps us appreciate the bigger picture in its kind of devastating complexity.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:11:13

Absolutely. And I think what's so -- what's so important to keep in mind, right, is that, in a lot of ways, the ADA represents an institutionalization of the idea that disabled people are debt and eugenic burdens. Now, folks who have read Health Communism are going to be familiar with that terminology, but it's the kind of idea that like, you know, disabled people as a population are this uniquely burdensome economic identity, and that capitalism has to draw a line somewhere. And that unique and extreme sense of sort of burden is framed as not just being something that the nation cannot bear or that the state cannot bear, but that it's such a burden, that to bear it, and to assume the responsibility for care and collective thriving of disabled people, would be the undoing of the state, of the nation itself.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:12:23

Life as we know it.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:12:24

Life as we know it. Now, what are they talking about here, really? Are they saying that if we paid for the needs of disabled people, we would undo society and cause it to collapse? Maybe. I mean, that's what it's often interpreted us. But I like to think about it also as being a claim about what could happen to the economic order. What would happen to class relations, if we were to provide for the needs of this group that is considered to be a burden qua burden, cannot possibly accommodate these needs, such that it's a national security threat, you know? A political economy cannot bear too many burdens, is kind of this fundamental principle that ultimately has never actually been tested, right? Like these ideas about collapse, right, like, are they really saying society is going to collapse if we stop and take care of everyone that has needs, to the extent that they have needs, try and meet them? Or are they saying that to do that, right, would maybe remove the incentives to work and cause the relations of extraction and exploitation that they rely upon, you know, the subjection of the surplus class is also a subjective force oppressing the working class. And if the way the ADA was supposed to work, right, as we've been talking about all along, you know, it was supposed to work by securing more rights for disabled people through expanding access to work. Since the ADA, employment rates for disabled people have barely shifted, as we've been talking about. As we've also talked about, ADA plaintiffs are among the least successful litigants in federal court history. ADA claims have a very high likelihood to fail, I think second only to litigation for releasing people who are incarcerated, which is fucking depressing. You know, as we've also mentioned, both the Supreme Court and lower court after lower court have issued decision after decision limiting the scope of the ADA. The 2008 updates to the ADA still, you know, did not structurally shift the institutionalization of this idea of the kind of debt and eugenic burden being associated with disability as an identity class. And I think thanks to the kind of popular explanation for why this is not happening, right, you know, which is that this is all the result of backlash, right? That the popular narratization of the origin, the focus, the purpose, the achievements of the disability rights movement, and why we haven't achieved the ultimate sort of accessibility and inclusion that were the working goals of these movements, and why we haven't had any significant disability policy since, right, like the story goes that this is because of backlash. And now that argument has really become ironclad. And I think with many saying that there's really nothing wrong with the ADA itself. That the problem with the ADA not working is in society. It's bad judges, bad bosses, bad actors, not a structural institutional feature of the law and what it enshrined and formalized within the political economy, producing the results that we're seeing. Now, I mean, I think one of the things I would love for us to do next is to go through some of these receipts for how the ADA was sold. And for that, we'll be drawing heavily on the work of lawyer and legal scholar, as Sam Bagenstos, who's been heavily involved with the ADA - ADA litigation, implementation, the update in 2008, for decades. We're also going to be drawing on the work of Marta Russell here, who I mentioned earlier, and who Bagenstos is also building on. But the piece that we're really thinking about here, and that we'll be reading some quotes from, is Bagenstos' 2003 piece for William & Mary Law Review, called The ADA as Welfare Reform. So you know, I think Sam Bagenstos' definition of what the ADA is supposed to do is actually like a very accurate one. And this is from a different essay, he writes that the ADA is best interpreted as "aiming to provide a stigmatized group, whose members are likely to experience systemic social disadvantages, with tools to challenge practices that deny them equal opportunities to participate in the full range of economic, civil and political affairs of the community." And I think that's a really important framing, because it pushes back on the idea that when ADA cases go bad in the courts, it's because the judge has imposed like their own view of disability on the case, or that the judge is being swayed by backlash alone, which reflects the kind of dominance of the narrative that the ADA was animated by this single set of principles that can be like uncontroversially identified. And, you know, all of this is treated, like the idea of like, oh, well, these ADA cases that have gone bad, these are poor interpretations of the ADA. These are against the meaning of the ADA. And what Sam argues, is that, no, that's not the case. And we need to stop taking the idea of sort of disability litigation being so unsuccessful and the ADA really failing to deliver on what it was marketed as, as being able to accomplish, as a failure of individual actors. We need to be looking at some of the more structural reasons why the ADA cases that we've seen have produced the results that they have, And so to quote Sam from his piece, ADA as Welfare Reform, where he's sort of setting up the claim that the ADA should be thought of within the context of the welfare reform movement, as we've been talking about, he says:

"ADA defenders have tended to ignore the fact that at the time the statute was proposed and debated in Congress, many of the statue's strongest supporters justified it in terms that are quite compatible with the cases that ADA defenders now criticize. In particular, supporters sold the statute as a means of avoiding the social costs of dependency, by moving people off of benefits rolls and into the workforce. I call this the welfare reform argument. When considered in the light of that purpose, the cases discussed begin to make a great deal of sense."

And so we're talking about things like why someone on SSDI seeking to access their accessibility rights to the ADA might be punished and framed as a benefit cheat, a liar, and a manipulator of the judicial system for simply accessing both programs that any reasonable person would assume someone with a disability identity would be entitled to.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:18:59

Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm disproportionately likely to encourage people to read law review articles. But you know, listeners, if this piques your interest, it's a really, just really wonderful, wonderful essay. It's really thorough, and I just so appreciated, as a historian, the attention to bring in all of the -- all of the receipts and just kind of going through them methodically. But you know, in a really -- I don't know, it's just if you watch them stack, you're like, oh, everyone's saying the same thing. How interesting [laughing]. And just some of the rhetoric. I mean, it's a bit jolting, right? You know, when the legislation is first introduced in the House, you know, Sam quotes Tony Coelho, principal sponsor of the bill in the House, who said:

"Our entire society bears the economic burdens of this prejudice. Dependency is expensive. It increases benefit entitlements and decreases productive capacity sorely needed by the American economy."

I mean, it's just like, cool, cool, cool. We're at the point where like, you know, prejudice is expensive. It causes all of these indirect ways we have to spend money, and so it's cheaper [laughing] to -- which it's like, what he's saying is it's cheaper to be non-discriminatory, but what's really being said is, it's cheaper to designate and name the value of disability, as its potential to be productive and do productive labor. So blatant, like so blatant.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:20:33

So blatant. One of my favorites is a quote that Bagenstos pulls from like page one, paragraph one of the proposal from 1986 that I mentioned, which was like one of the first drafts of the law. So in 1986, the National Council on the Handicapped, which, you know, Justin Dart, who we've mentioned several times, he's one of the sort of key figures here, he's someone who was involved in the Reagan administration, he's then kind of involved in these meetings of conservative disability theorists and legal theorists who are coming together, and doing what conservatives and think tanks do, like sitting around and thinking about ideas with, again, the kind of power and the money to do that, right. And so they produce this report called Toward Independence, which was like the first proposal where the law is called the Americans with Disabilities Act. And so that's 1986. And the first page of the Executive [Summary], the one of the first paragraphs reads:

"Our nation's current annual federal expenditure on disability benefits and programs exceeds $60 billion. This report proposes some fiscally responsible approaches for spending disability related dollars more prudently and productively. The council is strongly convinced that present and future cost of disability to the nation are directly related to the degree of success we attain in reducing existing barriers, both structural and attitudinal, and in providing appropriate services to individuals with disabilities so that they may realize their full potential and become more independent and self sufficient."

So the idea, you know, from the very beginning, the first line of the framing of the idea, the first thing lawmakers, policymakers, the public are often told to think about, is this idea of what the big dollar sign is on disability, and how the Americans with Disabilities Act can translate that into less of a burden. And also how much of a burden and a threat that burden actually is, you know? I mean, the idea of $60 billion disability policy overhead, at a moment where the constant conversation is on the national debt in the late 80s. Imagine if the ADA was being sold during our most recent debt ceiling negotiations, where we saw the unwinding of Medicaid occur as a budget compromise. Millions of people are getting kicked off of their Medicaid right now, for procedural reasons. 3.3 million and counting as of time of recording, because the Biden administration was okay with the putting the Medicaid population on the table in a budget negotiation. This is why the contexts and the material harms of compromises are really important to examine. Because, you know, when we're talking about what does it mean for the first line of a pitch for a law that gives disabled people rights, starts with it costs $60 billion dollars to take care of these people, and we can't spend that anymore, in the context of an identity, right, that exists in the most sort of economic context possible already in the cultural imaginary. We're always talking about disability in terms of cost, right, as we've been talking about. So what does it mean to actually start a conversation with a critique of programs that maintain the "dependency" of the disabled, which are survival programs, which many of the people actually doing the ADA work absolutely did not want to go away, right? Because how do you fucking survive without that shit? But they -- many were sort of asking like, is SSDI really all I'm ever gonna have access to? Like, can't I do other things too, do I really need to sort of stay in the system, right? How that kind of can be so dangerous when translated through the lens of budget hawk, sort of zero sum obsession with fiscal austerity and the idea that for anything to happen in America, somebody has to pay in a fucking pound of flesh.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:24:42

Right. No, and I so appreciate that Sam starts with major legislative proponents who are taking this language directly from the council, right? So they're being given a kind of green light, but also that $60 billion figure becomes like one of the most kind of -- I don't know, it becomes a hot potato right? Everyone's passing it around. Well, not a hot potato. It just becomes like a form of currency during the legislative process, but like, you know, Sam's first examples are all liberal Democrats. Liberal Democrats. Tony Coelho in the house, or Tom Harkin, right, who's like the principal Democratic Party sponsor of legislation in the Senate, is also like a liberal. But this is the guy who's saying, "The ADA will save the government and society billions of dollars, by getting people off the dependency of social welfare and into jobs, into restaurants, into shopping centers, and into community activities." Like, whoo-hoo, shopping centers, restaurants, the solution to everything in America. But you know, it's just, I think, helpful to see this chain of custody, that the rhetoric might, you know, be handed off, in one instance, from the council to liberal Democrats who are moving it around, gets passed to conservatives, Republicans, you know, everyone is partaking in it. So it's not just some sort of tactical compromise, right? Like this is a genuine ideological agreement that is prefacing and securing the passage of this law.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:26:15

Absolutely. And, you know, members of Congress are not the only people who are selling it this way. There's a fantastic paragraph that I know listeners are going to love, that I'm excited to read, where Bagenstos walks through the way that the ADA was covered in the New York Times, sort of just taking the New York Times as the sort of standard, typical liberal publication, right, the sort of mainstream, not perceived of by the general public as conservative. I think many of our listeners, and you and I might disagree with the framing that the New York Times is not conservative, but you know, if we take it as the kind of quintessential example of a liberal paper, right, I think that this coverage is so telling. And it's reflected across all sorts of other different media outlets, but Sam just specifically walks through the New York Times here. So he writes:

"In an editorial applauding the new statute on the day after President Bush signed the ADA to law, the Times noted the following crucial point about the costs and benefits of implementing the statute. 'The federal government now spends $57 billion every year on benefits for the disabled. That figure will surely shrink if the disabled have greater access to jobs. A year earlier, while the ADA bill was pending on the Senate floor, the Times ran an op-ed by James Brady, entitled 'Save Money: Help the Disabled.'"

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:27:38

Hmm.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:27:39

Ugh:

"In that piece, Brady argued, as he had in the congressional hearings, that the ADA could, 'Save taxpayers billions of dollars by outlawing discrimination, putting disabled people on the job roles, and thereby reducing government disability payments.' After the Senate passed the legislation, the Times ran a letter to the editor written by Tom Harkin, headed 'How to Help the Disabled Pay Their Own Way.' [laughing] Harkin concluded his letter with the following comment, 'For too long, taxpayers have been writing a blank check (last year's was for $57 billion) to keep the disabled dependent, when clearly they want to be contributing members of society. With the Senate's strong approval of the bill, we will all begin to get our money's worth.'"

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:28:26

Oh. Ohh.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:28:26

Bagenstos continues:

"Nor was the Times' treatment of this point limited to the editorial page. In two long news pieces in 1989 -- a front page article in August, shortly after the Senate Labor Committee had approved its version of the bill, and a 'week in review' article in December, after the ultimate passage of the law became 'virtually certain' -- New York Times reporters referred prominently to the ADA supporters' argument that the statute would save money by reducing welfare dependency. Other national newspapers and national wire services gave similar prominence to the welfare reform argument. In October 1989, for example, during the Senate debate, the Wall Street Journal ran a pro-ADA letter to the editor by then-Attorney General Dick Thornburgh. The second paragraph of the letter, which provided Thornburgh's major substantive reason for enacting the statute, rested entirely on the welfare reform argument: 'For too long federal policy has provided massive financial resources for income-support programs to maintain individuals with disabilities in a state of dependency. The new disability legislation, on the other hand, will promote the independence of people with disabilities to enable them to enter into the mainstream of American life. By removing barriers to full participation by disabled individuals, the bill will have direct and tangible benefits for the economy. The result will be more disabled people working, increased earnings, less dependence on the Social Security system, increased spending on consumer goods and increased tax revenues.'"

So as you can see, and I think as Bagenstos really lays out in the different ways that he's sort of presenting all the different arguments for welfare reform in this paper and how they coalesce, you know, you've got Democrats, you've got Republicans, you've got conservative Republicans, you've got moderate Republicans, you've got liberal Democrats, you got moderate Democrats, you got disability advocates themselves, you've got the media, you've got op eds, you've got straight news coverage, you've got the Post, the Times, all of the sort of corners are all coalescing, and the one thing they all agree on, at the end of the day, is the idea that, you know, this policy is a good idea because it's going to save money. And one of the reasons that I'm really sort of hammering hard on this, and I hope that longtime listeners are maybe like, oh, is this why they're really adamant on Death Panel about being like, it doesn't fucking matter how much Medicare for All costs and we need to fucking stop talking about it. Yeah, this is part of why, right? Like if we allow some of these central narratives to become the dominant point of discussion or agreement within a kind of policy construction process, which is about power and statecraft, and about sort of reckoning with the forces of power and the way the state constructs itself, if we allow certain rhetorical ideologies to become central, it's not just a compromise to get the thing done, right? Often that thing, that was the compromise, whatever value was compromised, or whatever ethical line was compromised, or whatever group was left out, right, that then as the policy goes from proposal and point of advocacy to legitimate law, to something that then stands as court precedent, challenged, updated, right, like, that is how values and ideologies and really harmful ideas are institutionalized within our political economy, and then scaled up in a way that doesn't produce liberation, that doesn't produce incremental reform the way that it's promised to, but it produces a formalization of these very fucking harmful extractive dynamics, which sometimes are as simple as the idea that disabled people cost too much.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:32:07

Mhm, mhm. No, exactly. It gives us a level of political clarity to our understanding, also of the sleight of hand, what makes the ADA so neoliberal is the way in which it facilitates the -- what we might call the ideological obscuring of the causes of broad shifts in political economy, say like everyone's -- you know, the vast majority of people's experience of the downward shift in their living conditions, or the stagnation of wages, or the having to work more jobs, or worse jobs, right? Part of what you see, and I think, you know, Sam's so smart to spend all this time drawing on all this media coverage, like as early as the late 80s, you're also seeing people claim, particularly in these kinds of op eds, right, that somehow disabled people are the cause of like the crisis in political economy that is typical of the 80s, because there's this hidden cost, or this extreme cost, or this excessive, impossible cost that the state has been fronting, seemingly for no reason at all, except due to the indulgences of, you know, the New Deal or the Johnson administration or something, right? But the Washington Post editorial in 1990 that he mentions, actually ties that $60 billion a year figure to the phrase "paying people to stay home" as if it's like this sort of irrational waste of money that is so typical of the welfare state. We just give people money to keep them at home, because that's so irrational. Or you know, there's a local op-ed from the St. Petersburg Times, which I assume is in Florida, 1989, that mentions, you know, this bill being, "Part of our strategy to get our nation's economic house in order." And so there's also this kind of -- the logic of welfare reform, right, often incorrectly, which is to say, politically, ideologically, on purpose, claims that welfare state expenditures themselves somehow caused the political economic crisis of the 70s and the 80s -- recessions, you know, stagflation, declining wages, declining living conditions for working people, right. And so therefore, the solution to the crisis is actually to perpetuate the crisis even further by engaging in extreme welfare reform. And so there is also, I think, just this level of political clarity we can get here, right, where we have to understand that also, like the shift is really quite substantial here, right, kind of carving these -- this sort of false narrative around the idea of receiving any public benefit or just public investment as itself producing crises in capitalism, right, is just sort of this kind of ass-backwards thing that neoliberalism makes really -- I mean, like, we just live and breathe this discourse every day now. So it's like, I'm sure it sounds really obvious to everyone. But I just think it's so helpful to trace it back. And then also, I think, when we achieve that level of clarity and understanding, right, that that's sort of just a series of lies, then it also brings this roundabout back to a question, right, that you kind of posed for us earlier, that I think also again, Health Communism is the companion -- well, it's the permanent companion to all Death Panel episodes -- but it's really a companion to this one, because that kind of question you tendered in passing, right, this rhetorical question that I think is worth actually asking, right? Are people really claiming that if we invested in everything it took to take care of people, that "society would collapse," right? And maybe one answer to that is like, well, capitalist society would collapse. Yes. Yes. [laughing] That is the goal, right? So that's sort of the same thing around like Medicare for All, right, like the point is, yeah, it should cost so much, or inevitably, it will cost so much that a certain kind of society is no longer sustainable. That's precisely the point. Anything else is actually conceding so much to this ideological project that lies about the causes of the crisis in capitalism and the causes of widespread immiseration in the first place by blaming, you know, the people who are experiencing those crises in their highest pitched kind of versions, blaming them and blaming state intervention, right. And that's, I think, a roundabout way to get back to this reassessment of oh, the ADA manifestly has failed in its principal goal of getting people to work. Well, no wonder it failed, because it decimated all of the public investments and programs that were for survival, right? That if you take those away, and say, now, now, go try and get a job, well, no shit, no one can do it, right. And so again, like, ah, all of a sudden, the ADA seems really, really, really key to understanding the way that "welfare" has been politicized since really the 1980s.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:37:13

And, you know, you have things like the idea that the ADA was gonna unlock like 8 million more members of like, what, you know, you would basically call like, in a Marxist analysis, the surplus reserve army, right?

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:37:31

Exactly.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:37:31

Like, of a group of workers that were kind of artificially kept out of work. So you're now basically saying, in a moment where, you know, for example, let's think about what is happening in the early 1990s. What is happening in terms of global trade policy, in terms of unionization, right, in terms of shifts in employment, shifts in benefits, shifts in things like the growth of managed care, and changes to welfare policy that have reduced the frameworks for who can like acceptably be out of work, right. So in a lot of ways, disability was a kind of last untouched island, that, you know, capitalism, in many ways had for a long time held as an exception. And this is something we talk about in the LABOR chapter of Health Communism, where we sort of look back at the poor laws and some of these first attempts in, you know, 1300s UK to sort the lower classes and say okay, who do we punish for not working, and who can we not really punish for not working, right? And sort of how do we then manage limited resources under this model of some people deserve to not work and some people don't. But I think what's so important to understand and also, you know, I'd be very curious sometime to talk to folks who do a lot of work on like the increased casualisation of labor relations or things like the gig economy, you know, who maybe are coming at it from a disability perspective, and might be considering perhaps the influence of the ADA on certain other aspects of labor relations. I mean, Marta Russell called disabled people, the canary in the coal mine for the working class. Like that the idea was that what was happening to disabled people is what the working class could expect in terms of their conditions of employment. And what she's talking about is things like the sub-minimum wage, which is still legal in the United States, disabled people, you know, many of disabled people are still employed in what's called a sheltered workshop. And, you know, there's been a really long sort of campaign of apparently claiming to eliminate these things. Well, they maintain, right? So, you know, there are laws in the United States that say that you can pay disabled people less than the minimum wage, right? Like that is literally the fucking most disgustingly vulgar literalization of Marx's surplus reserve army idea, of the kind of permanent underclass of folks who are kept unemployed in order to be kind of leveraged as strikebreakers, or as you know, workers that come in to help keep wages down. The kind of idea of precarity being necessary to a class system in order to kind of force acceptance of substandard living and working conditions and substandard wages. And maybe you're kind of approaching this point in the conversation thinking, okay, well, this is fucking bleak, right. But part of what I think is really interesting here is that it really is such an important lesson in how power works for state building, in terms of how to understand state building and statecraft and policy craft through the lens of not just interest groups, and competing preferences, but in terms of power relations, right. And economic power relations are part of that, but it's also social and political power. But at the end of the day, I think what's really important to understand is also that, you know, part of why this policy got popular is maybe because they had something to sell that people wanted, right, like the welfare reform argument. But I think at the same time, what that kind of framing kind of hides a little bit is the idea that like, if you tack welfare reform on to anything, it'll sell itself is kind of the implication, right? And I think that undermines actually the work that the disability movement did. Now for all of our criticisms of their conservative ideology, they had a fucking pretty tight strategy, if we're thinking about this, this media coverage that we've been talking about and the discussion in Congress from another perspective, right, like, this is a very tight messaging operation, right. Like you have everything from congressional testimony, reports in Congress, media coverage, both sides of the aisle, professional media coverage, straight media coverage in terms of reporting, op-eds placed in influence media coverage, local news coverage, including first person accounts from disabled people repeating these welfare reform narratives. I'm gonna give another example. Jules read the one from the St. Petersburg Times. Here's another one that comes from a 1989 editorial in the Arkansas Gazette. "Even now, there are roadblocks and disincentives to my working. It is very cost effective to assist me to work rather than to have me stay on disability payments. The disincentives don't make sense. Rather than forcing disabled people to enter nursing homes or lead restrictive lives due to inaccessibility and lack of assistance, it makes sense to support changes that allow people with disabilities to work." If you think about sort of where this framing is most successful, is it the welfare reform argument, or is it the ubiquity with which the welfare reform argument was allowed to socially reproduce? I guess, in a way, it's a chicken and the egg conversation. But I think that's another rhetorical question that's really important to consider here. Because when we talk about why it's important to really think through things like advocacy for Medicare for All, and not leaning on cost benefit analysis to prove the point that a policy is good, to push beyond these austerity frameworks that drive us towards policy solutions, like selling the ADA as a, you know, 8 million person strong workforce you can probably underpay, as a way to reduce the budget constraints of the welfare state, right, like that that has really important material implications. And when we lean on things like saying, okay, like, well, I bet the way we can get everyone to agree on Medicare for All is to say it's going to save money, right? Like, are we talking about an argument that people are actually all going to agree with? Or is it something that because of where it exists rhetorically and ideologically, it's an argument that's going to be allowed to reproduce throughout many modes of engaging rhetorically with this idea, which then facilitates the social reproduction? So is it an idea that is going to be allowed on the political horizon of policymaking? Is it allowed on the op-ed pages? Is it allowed in coverage? Or is it an idea that's only allowed in the personal, first person statements of disabled people, right? What I think is very telling about this example that I read from the Arkansas Gazette is that, yeah, there's the welfare reform argument in there. And there's also an argument that is questioning the logic of the total institution.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:37:31

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:44:42

And you don't see the questioning of the logic in the total institution in the statements by Congressmembers, by op-ed pages. But you see that couched within the welfare reform argument here, in the first person account of a disabled person who is doing advocacy work, who is advocating for a policy, you know, probably knowing its limitations from the tone of sort of how this is framed. And yeah, you know, those are the terms that this person is likely allowed to speak on this topic. These are the terms that are norms for discussing this policy by this point, by 1989. So, it's so important sometimes to be a hard ass on stuff, not just for winning rhetorical points, or for being right, or being a pedantic asshole, though I am one, and I love to be one. At the end of the day, it has a material life beyond, you know, the instance that it exists in, and that has a really important structural component in terms of like, understanding why political economy can make it so fucking hard to survive.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:45:51

So well said. I think being a hard ass here is ultimately, part of really wrestling with just how difficult it is to do structurally oriented social movement work, to be a part of a movement, and to learn -- you know, to learn how to -- to learn how to unlock a level of imagination and desire that can, you know, break through some of these just hard stops that are really built in. And I think that's really one of the huge challenges that we all face in thinking about our relationship to various social movements. You know, how did they have these breakthrough moments where we, you know, shatter a little bit of that business as usual. And also, yeah, appreciate a kind of complexity where, in fact, sometimes organizing from your own material conditions and the midst in which you live, and opposing things that are genuinely harmful, and horrid, and just absolutely how just in your own life can be conscripted, both wittingly and unwittingly, towards the ends of the order of things, to the ends of the state, to the ends of capital, and can be in many ways, sort of deflated, confined, domesticated, whittled down to a point where they don't even resemble what you thought it was you were saying, or something in between that, right. And just kind of the real difficulty of how we, how we sit with that, and work from that premise. Yeah. I just think that's one thing that this conversation has really deepened for me, just the profound difficulty of sitting with that, and also the importance of retrospective, I mean, you know, anniversaries or whatever, but having them -- taking them as an opportunity to think about how the passage of time has been framed so far, what success and failure has been deemed to be so far, go back, look at what was going on at the time, and ask sort of what have we lost in the kind of sedimentation of a common sense point of view about what happened, and what the outcomes are of something like the ADA and come to find that, oh, wait a minute, that it doesn't really quite make sense. So what would we like to remember about 1990? What would we like to remember about the 1970s? What are the lessons we'd like to draw from the way the ADA has fared so far? And what is instructive, right, what builds our political imagination, so that we can, you know, think about collectively breaking some of the cycles, that some of -- some of these disability rights activists were locked into, or for whatever reason, right, found themselves kind of stuck in, right, that got us the welfare reform version of this law. So what's it gonna take for us to imagine something that isn't a welfare reform version of disability justice?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:48:58

Mhm. No, and I think, you know, that's why we have to be so -- such hard asses about what disability justice means versus disability rights, right?

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:49:06

Yep.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:49:07

Because when you lay it out this way, and you understand that the major policy victory of the disability rights movement is not just anti-discrimination law, but also fundamentally important to the history and trajectory of welfare reform. You know, I think there's a discussion that needs to be had about perhaps what the ADA might have done to pave the way for the welfare reform during the Clinton administration. I mean, this is an area of work where there are disability scholars and legal scholars who were thinking about this and talking about this, but, you know, the ADA is new. And there is a high barrier to disabled people becoming anointed members of the academy who get to sit and do this kind of study. And I think part of what happens also is that a policy then is totally under threat, and so you kind of have these moments where the ADA is challenged and all the organizing comes around defending the policy. And I think there are so many parallels, whether it's thinking about the ACA and Medicare for All, whether we're thinking about Medicaid and the kind of compromises that we make in the context of budget decisions, or the ways that policies can be unintentionally counterinsurgent, like with Medicare original, right, and Medicaid, and the ways that the ADA kind of changed the policy landscape where you saw, you know, dozens of federal bills suddenly be sort of trickled to a halt. And I think the other lesson we really have here is that the stories we tell about success and failure, and what that precludes in terms of like the political horizon or moving forward, are really harmful, right? Like, we tell the story that the ADA is enough, and it is not enough, and we need so much more. And maybe we don't need more ADA, but we need something fundamentally different. And part of what we're up against here is not just the power of the ruling class, and not just the power of the political economy, but the mode and genre itself of policymaking being a very conservative institution that is tailored towards entrenching the status quo, because things must always kind of be based on our prior solutions. So you know, if the ADA was understood as a means of saving society money by moving people, you know, off of disability benefits into the workforce, then not only does that kind of reduce the idea of there being a worthy population on which the state should bestow any kind of protection moving forward, as I'm saying, like, you know, you could think about this in terms of being really important on the trajectory of how we get from 80s welfare reform to, you know, things like the end of sort of cash grant programs that come very specifically during the Clinton welfare reform, where you see this reaction to cash in kind, this real sort of institutionalization of the suspicion of the benefit fraud, which had really sort of been a rhetoric against expansion, but becomes a logic about population management and about needs for increased surveillance, and tailoring types of benefits and things like that. And so you really, I think, can't understand the history and the power of welfare reform, without understanding the ADA's placed within that history. And I don't think that there's anything we can sort of take from this, that's a better example of how to be thinking about organizing and policy and compromise, than the fact that, you know, what the ADA potentially does also, is it limits the horizon of what policy solutions are available moving forward to those that address the same problems, right, that those that address a means of saving society money, a means of -- right. So if we're thinking about how this forces the life of a disabled person to be wholly mediated by cost benefit analysis, it also forces the landscape of what future policy innovations could be to also ascribe to that ideology of cost benefit analysis, unless we wholly reject these things and learn ways to talk about and reproduce and force, you know, the range of acceptable conversation and the range of expertise beyond anointed expertise into embodied expertise and sort of allow people to, you know, speak on policy honestly, in multiple forums, right, we're always going to be kind of battling this route of sort of compromise and acceptable narratives versus what harm those narratives do, and why they become acceptable and dominant and sort of what purpose does that serve towards the maintenance of power and the status quo.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:54:05

Mm. Well, cosigned. [laughing] No, it's just this kind of basic bedrock principle, critique moves from the actually existing conditions of the world, and so even if we're here to say a lot of tough stuff about the ADA, it's because it is significant, it's important. It has real -- had real repercussions and effects. And, you know, part of that -- part of the power of critique is that it helps you understand the way that your own imagination has been captured by those existing conditions that -- that have confined our ability to think otherwise.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:54:44

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, ultimately, we're definitely never gonna stop having conversations about the ADA and these kinds of ideas on the show --

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:54:54

Nope [laughing].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:54:54

And we definitely need to do a whole episode on the independent living movement.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:54:59

Yesss.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:54:59

Because, you know, the kind of missing link between how this sort of power becomes concentrated within folks who have this ideology, really, you have to look at the development of the independent living movement to sort of understand how this becomes ascendant, which is like a whole other conversation. So I know we never do this, but if you want us to cover that, DM me and let me know.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:55:24

Yeah. Well, I'm not DMing you, I'm just telling you right now.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:55:29

That's fair, that's fair.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:55:30

I want us to do that. Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:55:32

I think it'd be really fun, too. And I mean, I think that there are just so many important lessons that folks doing work right now, specifically around thinking around Long COVID, around SSDI, COVID related workplace accommodations, like we are getting involved in these fights. There have not been a lot of major, you know, federal ADA cases concerning COVID in the workplace. This is like something that we're going to be, I'm assuming, hopefully, maybe seeing in the next year, but who knows, like the pace of the courts and the resources that people have to initiate these kinds of suits, as we've been saying, it's an access problem that's self made, right? But I think keeping this stuff in mind, and sort of understanding the true nature of the laws and the systems that we're fucking up against is so important for us to really figure out how, you know, people who are -- who are doing work on COVID and ADA accommodations, you know, they need to understand what the fuck they're up against, right. And the way that we talk about the ADA as the gold standard, right? That I think is a dangerous -- it's a dangerous force within organizing, because I think it really gets people's hopes up that there is an answer in that policy, that they can find a way, if they can, you know, push through, they can find justice there. And the problem is when you sort of dig down into the actual text of the ADA, and you look at, you know, what do these statutes say, you know, never forget that the ADA says, you know, quoting Ruth Colker here, from her LPE Blog piece, The Reactive Model of Reasonable Accommodation:

"Employers, public entities, and private businesses are allowed to ignore the inaccessible nature of their programs or activities, until an individual with a disability seeks or begs for access."

And this is what we're up against. And it's really important to understand.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:57:28

Absolutely.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:57:28

Well, we have been recording for way too long now. I think this is the perfect place to leave it.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:57:30

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:57:30

Patrons, thank you so much for supporting the show. We couldn't do any of this without you. If you'd like to support the show, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. You'll get access to all of our weekly bonus episodes and entire back catalogue of bonus episodes. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up a copy of Health Communism at your local bookstore, or request it at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_. As always, Medicare for All now, solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.

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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)