ADA RESTORATION ACTION CENTER

After years of being weakened in the courts, Congress is coming to the rescue of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the bipartisan civil rights protections signed into law in 1990. This vital legislation will restate and clarify the intent of Congress in order to keep the promise of the ADA. Please take action now to encourage members of Congress to sign-on and pass this legislation which was drafted with the support of a broad coalition of disability organizations.  

Contact Congress

Click the link above to tell your members of Congress to support the ADA Restoration Act.

Sign the Petition

Click the link above to show your support for passage of the ADA Restoration Act. We will distribute the petitions to Congress and the media.

Tell Your Story

Click the link above to tell your story about disability discrimination, how the ADA has helped you or how the promise of the ADA is still unfulfilled. We will share these testimonials with Congress and the media.

Get On the Bus

Click the link above to follow the Road To Freedom: Keeping the Promise of the ADA, our year-long, cross-country bus tour promoting the restoration of the ADA.   Freedom bus Check out the tour schedule, read the blog and view photos of our journey so far covering more than 20,000 miles, 40 states and more than 60 bus stop events.

BACKGROUND:
Seventeen years ago, Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) with overwhelming bipartisan support. However, in recent years, a number of Supreme Court decisions have significantly reduced the protections available to people with disabilities in employment settings.

Courts are quick to side with businesses and employers, deciding against people with disabilities who challenge employment discrimination 97% of the time, often before the person even has a chance to show the employer treated them unfairly.  

Indeed, courts have created an absurd Catch-22 by allowing employers to say a person is “too disabled” to do the job but not “disabled enough” to be protected by the ADA. People with conditions like epilepsy, diabetes, HIV, cancer, hearing loss, and mental illness that manage their disabilities with medication, prosthetics, hearing aids, etc. -- or “mitigating measures” -- are viewed as “too functional” to have a disability and are denied the ADA’s protection from employment discrimination.

People denied a job or fired because an employer mistakenly believes they cannot perform the job or because the employer does not want people with disabilities in the workplace are also denied the ADA's protection from employment discrimination.

As Rep. Steny Hoyer stated when he introduced the ADA Restoration Act of 2007 on July 26, 2007, “the point of the ADA is not disability; it is the prevention of wrongful and unlawful discrimination.” The courts have spent an exorbitant amount of time parsing the question of whether a person is really “disabled,” when the real question is whether the person was treated unfairly on the basis of an irrelevant personal characteristic (disability). Courts do not require people alleging race or sex discrimination under other civil rights laws to first prove their race or gender – instead, they look at whether race or gender was the basis for the adverse action. Under the ADA, however, before a court will hear a person’s discrimination claim, the person is currently required to first prove in excruciating detail how “disabled” he or she is. This is not what Congress intended in the original ADA. 

Instead, as Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner said when he joined Mr. Hoyer in the introduction of the ADA Restoration Act of 2007, this bill helps ensure that the ADA takes its rightful place among other civil rights laws, and “will force courts to focus on whether a person has experienced discrimination ‘on the basis of disability,’ rather than require individuals to demonstrate that they fall within the scope of the law’s protection” at all. That was what Congress originally intended – to focus a spotlight on unfair discrimination against people with a broad range of disabilities. 

When Congress passed the ADA, when President George H. W. Bush signed the law, and when Attorney General Dick Thornburgh promulgated regulations to implement the law, the intent of the ADA was crystal clear – the law was intended to apply to everyone who experienced discrimination on the basis of disability, not just those with severe disabilities. Congress did not expect its legislative history, and prior case precedent, to be ignored.   

ADA Watch/NCDR joins CCD, NCIL and the larger disability rights community and urges Congress to pass the ADA Restoration Act (H.R. 3195), restoring the original intent of Congress to ensure the right to be judged based on performance, harmonizing the ADA with other civil rights laws, and requiring the courts to interpret the law fairly.