Posted on December 10, 2018
With the midterm elections behind us, disability advocates face an opportunity to make significant legislative gains.
The conventional wisdom holds that gridlock will dominate the 116th U.S. Congress, which begins in January 2019. With a GOP majority in the Senate and a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, both parties are poised to block each other’s most polarizing bills. But because there will likely be little movement on contentious agenda items, space will open up for other issues to come to the fore. The disability community is uniquely poised to take advantage.
Many disability-related policies were not only front and center in the midterm elections – several unified Democratic and Republican voters.
Posted on July 13, 2018
Last month, federal immigration agents separated a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome from her mother at the border. Nine months before that, agents did the same to a 16-year-old boy with autism, taking him from his caregiver grandmother.
Unimaginably unconscionable, their separations and those of some 2,300 other children at the border from their parents and other caregivers came in the wake of president Trump’s zero tolerance policy against immigrants allegedly entering the country illegally. Though the president eventually signed an executive order June 20 calling for children to instead be detained with their families through the duration of immigration proceedings, the damage is done.
Posted on November 22, 2016
More than a month after Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, the disability community shows little sign of letting go of its grief and fear and no wonder.
In Clinton, the community heard a candidate who took turns applauding people with disabilities (they’ve “changed things for the better in our country”) and advocating for them (they’re “too often invisible, overlooked and undervalued”).
She promoted a plan designed to push states to require health coverage for autism services in private insurance plans,
This entry was posted in autism, civil rights, community living, developmental disabilities, diversity, employment, inclusion, people with disabilities, physical disabilities, politics, public policy, subminimum wage, transportation, Uncategorized and tagged American Association of People With Disabilities, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, disability community, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, IDEA funding, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, National Council on Independent Living, New York Times, Rehabilitation Act, Serge Kovaleski.
