Equality of Opportunity: The Making of the Americans with Disabilities Act

Some Lessons

The passage of the ADA was a consciousness-changing experience for the 101st Congress and must remain an important analytic point of departure for the development of disability policy both now and in the future. This account therefore has as much to say about our public policy future as it does about our past.

Students of public policy and the American legislative process would do well to examine how the ADA came about. In our age of cynicism about the American political system, where partisan clashes have led to government shut-downs and rampant accusations, the ADA offers a refreshing example of how the legislative process can work when it works well. Passage of the ADA is a story of political leaders on both sides of the aisle who put aside personal and partisan differences to do what they thought was the right thing to do. The ADA was certainly not without its detractors, and debate was at times prolonged and intense. Moreover, near unanimous support in the final voting masks deep divisions that characterized the deliberative process. But members of Congress and the Bush administration demonstrated a remarkable cooperative spirit that resulted in a solid, durable act that has been able to withstand subsequent scrutiny. Furthermore, they maintained a high level of public debate that kept the ADA from falling victim to a venomous public debate controlled by spin doctors and political pundits as witnessed, for example, in the Civil Rights Act of 1991. In short, the passage of the ADA provides important lessons about restoring dignity to public debate about the leading issues of our time.

Also important for the enactment of the ADA was the ability of the ADA coalition to close ranks. Historically, the disability community has been divided internally, in part because of conflicts over limited public funding. With the ADA, however, scores of organizations representing thousands of people with different disabilities joined forces to work for a common cause. People with blindness fought the battles of those who used wheelchairs; persons with epilepsy fought the battles of those with deafness. The disability community’s abiding commitment to act as one unified voice helped keep the ADA a strong act and prevented the exclusion of specific subgroups of disabilities.