Why Bush 41 Supported the ADA
David Pettinicchio, University of Toronto
With the passing of President George H W Bush, the news has been filled with comments on the late president’s policy achievements. A major highlight is his signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
The ADA sought to ban discrimination based on disability status and mandate reasonable accommodations to guarantee freedom from discrimination, economic independence and participation of disabled people in mainstream life.
As such, the law that has been referred to as the “emancipation proclamation” for people with disabilities, and the greatest piece of civil rights legislation second only to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
To many, Bush’s support seemed to defy expectations. He was on board with comprehensive accessibility requirements in public transit where the American Public Transit Association saw the ADA as another burdensome regulation. Bush even supported including HIV/AIDS under the law when members of his own party vehemently opposed it. In addition to congressional Republican hold outs, there were also the various business lobbies and chambers of commerce who saw the ADA as reregulating the labor market, undermining everything Ronald Reagan had done in the 1980s.
So while we cannot discount the role of activists and sympathetic Democratic lawmakers who worked tirelessly to promote the ADA, it likely would not have passed without the help of Republicans trying to convince members of their own party to support the legislation — people like Bush, John McCain, Bob Dole, Justin Dart and Orrin Hatch.
Indeed, the ADA ultimately passed 403–20 in the House of Representatives, heralded as a great bipartisan triumph.
However, it’s important to put Republican support of the ADA into perspective. Sure, Bush supported civil/disability rights in the broadest sense. On a personal note, both the President and First Lady were said to relate to the legislation because of the one child they had lost due to a disability and their child currently coping with a disability.
Politically, the ADA also fit with Bush’s kinder and gentler America. And while the Bush White House wasn’t exactly leading a movement to restore civil rights, there wasn’t any strong will to continue the prior administration’s gutting of civil rights laws.
Perhaps most importantly, the ADA Bush 41 signed was a considerably water-downed version of the original bill. The law went through four different congressional committees, and their subcommittees, each with new amendments to consider.
Let’s be clear. The ADA was a product of negotiation. Both Republicans and Democrats sympathetic to the plight of people with disabilities wanted to get this thing done and that required political compromise to get all policy stakeholders on board.
Today, Democrats and Republicans point to the ADA as Bush 41’s greatest achievement. Yet at the time, Bush pitched the ADA less as a civil rights law and more of a policy meant to get the disabled off welfare. He also sought to tone down the law’s purported impact fearing it would generate backlash by business interests — which it did. He also could not shake the fact he signed into law a policy that conservatives saw as an expensive “welfare bill” produced by a Democratically controlled Congress.
To this day, the ADA arguably has never reached its full potential. That’s in part the result of these compromises, retreat from defending the law, problems of implementation, efforts by business interests to whittle away at the law, and courts’ conservative interpretations.
As a result, the issue of disability rights is far from settled. Recently, the 2017 ADA Education and Reform Act proposed further relaxing requirements for businesses to provide reasonable accommodations. At the same time the Trump Administration put Department of Justice enforcement of the accessibility of websites, medical equipment, and public accommodations on an “Inactive Actions” list.
Bush and the ADA are a symbol of a bygone era in politics. Despite all its flaws, today’s Republican Party would never consider legislation like the ADA, because the kind of political entrepreneurship within the GOP that allowed the ADA to find broad support no longer exists today. Instead, all we have seen over the last few years are numerous attempts to further undermine disability rights.
David Pettinicchio is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network.
