Recogniszing the 15th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act

RECOGNIZING THE 15TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE AMERICANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT

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Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senators KENNEDY, HATCH, REID, CLINTON, MCCAIN, DEWINE, JEFFORDS, MIKULSKI, LAUTENBERG, DOLE, DURBIN, LEVIN, LIEBERMAN, BOXER, REED, CHAFEE, SMITH, COLLINS, STABENOW, OBAMA, AKAKA, SALAZAR, DAYTON, BINGAMAN, WYDEN, BIDEN, ISAKSON, FEINGOLD, JOHNSON, NELSON of Florida, BROWNBACK, BURR, SNOWE, and PRYOR be added as cosponsors of the resolution.

The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, tomorrow, July 26, marks the 15th anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Observances and celebrations are being held and will be held all across the country. In fact, I attended three in Iowa over the weekend. There will be a big celebration tonight at the Kennedy Center where I look forward to introducing former President George Bush, the signer of the Americans with Disabilities Act, who will give the keynote address.

On this 15th anniversary, we celebrate one of the great landmark civil rights laws of the 20th century, a long overdue emancipation proclamation for people with disabilities. We also celebrate the men and women from all across America whose daily acts of heroism and protest and persistence and courage moved this law forward to passage 15 years ago.

In 1964, this country passed a civil rights bill. After much struggle, after the freedom riders and the marches in places such as Selma, AL, that are burned in our memories, we passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which closed a long, disgraceful chapter of segregation and discrimination, lack of equality of opportunity for Americans just based on race, mostly, sex, creed, and national origin.

I can remember coming home on leave from the military some time after that. I was with my brother Frank who had been totally deaf since early childhood. I had seen how he had been discriminated against all of his lifetime. I remember we were talking about different things, and he mentioned the civil rights bill. He thought it was all well and good. But then he asked the question: What about us? I didn't really know what he was talking about.

I said: Are you talking about us, me?

He said: What about us deaf people? We are discriminated against every day in terms of where we can work, can go, how we get news, how we go to school.

I began to think about it as I finished my career in the military and through law school and coming here to Congress. I thought, as I watched the struggle of people with disabilities to proclaim their involvement, that they should also be covered by the Civil Rights Act. So there were some minor steps taken. We had section 504 of the Rehab Act in 1973 before I got here. Then after coming to the House in 1974, we had the Education of Handicapped Children Act, 94-142, which my good friend, now Senator Jeffords, then Congressman Jeffords, was very much involved in getting passed in the House at that time. It later became known as IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. That is how it is known today.

Then there began a long struggle by people with disabilities to gain their full participation in our society.

This started in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then when I came to the Senate in 1984, 1985, it had been picking up steam and momentum. Various drafts of bills have been presented about disability and this and that.

Finally, it fell to me as chairman of the Disability Policy Subcommittee at that time to pull together the final draft. Here I will pay my great respect and admiration to former Senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, who led the charge before I got here to change the law to provide for an overarching law to cover people with disabilities in our country. But then Senator Kennedy asked me to join his committee and take over the chairmanship of the disability subcommittee, which I did, with the great help of wonderful staff, including Bobby Silverstein and others. We were able to get the words on paper, put it together. It was a pretty long struggle.

It was not a foregone conclusion that we could ever pass it. But there were acts of heroism. I can remember when people with disabilities started coming to Washington to protest. Sometimes they would plug the corridors in the Dirksen Office Building, and the police would have to clear them out. Many got arrested. I remember a man named Dwayne French, who came from Alaska to demonstrate, protest, and demand equal rights under the law. He got arrested and thrown into jail.

I tend to think the one thing that really crystalized what we were trying to do in terms of full participation, accessibility, of nondiscrimination and breaking down barriers--the one event was when Bob Kofka and the group ADAP rolled their wheelchairs up to the Capitol steps, and there were about between 50 and 75 people. I don't know the exact number. They got out of their wheelchairs and crawled up the steps of the Capitol; they crawled up the steps. That hit the evening news, all the newspapers, and the news magazines, and then we heard from the American public that this should not be allowed to happen, that people with disabilities ought to have accessibility; they ought to be able to participate in all aspects of our American life. And then we hammered out the bill and got it passed in the Senate and the House.

As I said, on July 26, 1990, in a wonderful ceremony, the biggest gathering for the signing of a bill in our Nation's history, people gathered on the lawn of the White House for the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act by President George Bush. It was a great and joyous occasion.

For all these years, after 1964, we thought we had torn down the walls of segregation. But there was a group of Americans for whom segregation was a daily occurrence, even after the Civil Rights Act, for whom daily discrimination was a fact of life, for whom equal opportunity was just some words on paper. There was a group of Americans for whom access to the American dream was basically closed because of their lack of participation in economic opportunity and accessibility. These were Americans with disabilities.

I often put it this way: On July 25, 1990, if you were a person of color, say, and you went down to apply for a job for which you were qualified and the prospective employer looked at you and said, I am not hiring African Americans, or Black people, or probably, in the contextual framework of that time, I am not hiring colored people, if he said that to you, you could have gone right down to the courthouse. The doors were open there, and you could have filed suit for discrimination based on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If, however, on July 25, 1990, you were a person with a disability and you went to a prospective employer for a job for which you were qualified--say you rode a wheelchair in there and the employer looked at you and said, We don't hire cripples, get out of here, and you rolled your wheelchair down to the same courthouse door. The doors were locked; they were closed. You had no cause of action. It was not illegal to discriminate on the basis of disability on July 25, 1990. On July 26, after President Bush signed it into law, the courthouse doors were opened. No longer would it be legal to discriminate on the basis of disability in our society.

So for the last 15 years, we have seen what I call a quiet revolution taking place in America. Look around you. You see the curb cuts, ramps, widened doors, elevators that are accessible, and people with disabilities can get on and off buses. I was in Iowa this weekend and went to an ATM machine to get some money, and the ATM machine is a talking one with brail so that a blind person can use the ATM machine. So we now see people with seeing-eye dogs going into restaurants to have a meal. Fifteen years ago, a restaurant could say, Get that dog out of here, we don't allow it. Now they have to allow it.

Now we see people with disabilities working jobs, traveling, enjoying life, going to movies. Yesterday, I went to a Cedar Rapids Colonels baseball game. It was disability day. They have a new baseball stadium there; it is 4 years old. It is one of the most accessible stadiums I have ever seen in my life. All kinds of people with disabilities can come there and enjoy baseball games. That would not have been true before. The old diamond had one place set aside down on the first base line with people walking in front of them all the time. Now they are up high, and they have great seats in this stadium. So we see this all around us.

For those of us who are able-bodied, we kind of take it for granted. It is not a big deal out there that you have curb cuts or access to buildings. I walked into a hotel downtown a week or so ago, where the National Commission on Independent Living, NCIL, was having their national meeting. Four or five people with disabilities coming into the Hyatt pushed a button at the door, and they could get their wheelchairs in and out. We don't even think about that. So it is a quiet revolution.

My nephew, who is an architect, told me a few years ago that now we are designing buildings the way they should be designed--fully accessible to all. We also have closed captioning on television for the deaf and hard of hearing. We can pick up our remote for the TV and punch the mute and see the words come up, and we take it for granted. But it has transformed lives in America. It has made us a better, richer, more fair society. Now the American family is much more complete than it was before.

So on this, the 15th anniversary, I say thank you to the disabled community of America for their long years of struggle and protest, for the hardships they went through just to make sure they were treated equally in our society. I always point out that in the ADA, there is not one nickel given to a person with a disability. It is not any kind of giveaway program. All it does is break down the barriers. People with disabilities now can apply their God-given talents and their abilities and contribute to our society. So it is quite a step forward for America. We have a lot to be proud of and a lot to be thankful for. But I must say that we are not totally to where we wanted to be.

We had four goals when we passed the ADA. One was economic self-sufficiency. Fifteen years later, over 60 percent of Americans with disabilities are still unemployed, without a job. That is still a national disgrace. So I hope we use this occasion of this 15th anniversary, yes, to look at the great strides we have made and how far we have come but also to recommit ourselves to make the ADA really complete. We have to do more in terms of job training, personal assistance services, and accessibility so that people with disabilities can have more jobs. Sixty percent unemployment is not right. So I hope we will redouble our commitment to getting this next step passed.

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