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To kick off our series highlighting the fight for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act we have on NDRN’s founder and former Executive Director Curt Decker. Curt tells us about how the disability community came together to make sure no one was left out of the protections of the ADA and warns us about the downsides of helping getting major legislation passed in summertime in DC.
Full Transcript available at: https://www.ndrn.org/resource/ndr-curt-decker/
Jack Rosen:
I don’t know. I guess someone has to kick it off, right?
Michelle Bishop:
One of us should definitely be talking. How long have we been recording?
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
Like four seconds? I don’t know. It’s raining outside, y’all. It’s gross.
Michelle Bishop:
Are we just sitting here not recording?
Jack Rosen:
We’re recording.
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
No, we’re sitting here recording. We’re just not speaking.
Michelle Bishop:
Sitting here recording nothing?
Jack Rosen:
I guess-
Michelle Bishop:
We can’t put out dead air.
Jack Rosen:
We could. We could do a more experimental-
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
[inaudible 00:00:24] nothing and it’d be fine.
Michelle Bishop:
Experimental?
Jack Rosen:
Yeah, we could do a more experimental type of podcast. Maybe it’s like jazz, where podcasting is about the notes you don’t play. Is that what people say about jazz?
Michelle Bishop:
Is it? Just roll the opening. Welcome back to National Disability Radio. I am one of your hosts. Michelle Bishop, voter access and engagement manager at NDRN.
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
And I’m Stephanie Flynt McEben, public policy analyst with NDRN.
Michelle Bishop:
And our producer who keeps trying to sneaky call himself a host.
Jack Rosen:
Hi, producer and host. Really bit of everything. The workhorse of the podcast, if you will. Jack Rosen here. How are you doing folks?
Michelle Bishop:
Not the workhorse of the podcast. Okay. Okay, wait, so this is… We’re kicking off our ADA special?
Jack Rosen:
Yes. This is the first for our series of interviews with folks who were involved in fighting for passage of the ADA. And for this one, we have on an old friend. Michelle, you want to tell people who we have?
Michelle Bishop:
So for the very first in our series on the ADA, we actually have a good friend of the podcast, Curt Decker, who is actually the former executive director of NDRN. He actually founded the National Disability Rights Network in 1982 and led the organization for, what, 40 years? Yeah, yeah. About 40 years. Before that, Curt was actually the director of the Maryland Disability Law Center, which is the Maryland PNA. He was also the director of the Help Resource Project for Abused and Neglected Children. And was a VISTA worker prior to being a senior attorney for Baltimore Legal Aid Bureau. So Curt has deep roots in Maryland and the DMV and was our fearless leader for… Stephanie, were you here when… Did you-
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
I was very briefly. So I started in 2021, and then Curt retired in summer of 2022.
Michelle Bishop:
Okay, so every single one of us can say that Curt was once upon a time our fearless leader before Marlene Sallo took the helm of NDRN. So in addition to all that, Curt actually was instrumental in the creation and passage of the ADA and was on the White House lawn the day that it was signed. And he’s here today to tell us about that experience.
Curt, did you go to Hamilton?
Curt Decker:
Yes.
Michelle Bishop:
I did not know that.
Curt Decker:
Oh yeah. That was so weird about my life. I grew up in Albany, went to Hamilton. I got accepted to Brown, but frankly, Hamilton gave me more money. So I went to Hamilton. Money was an issue. And then I ended up at Cornell for law school and took the New York bar, came down to Baltimore for one year as a legal aid attorney and never went back, and then… Never practiced law in New York, a total waste of time to take the New York bar and they still call me now to… Please, I’m long gone. Anyway.
I did a couple things in Baltimore, got hired by Maryland Disability Law Center, [inaudible 00:03:37] it was called something else then. It was the very first iteration of the PNA system when it was only developmental disabilities. And then I helped… You know the story. I helped form the national association with a bunch of other execs around the country because there wasn’t anything. And then started going over to Washington because I was the closest guy there, maybe other than DC, and started representing at NAPAS it was called then, first as a volunteer, then as a paid consultant, then executive director.
Michelle Bishop:
What did you do when you were actually at the Maryland PNA?
Curt Decker:
I was executive director. I got hired. I was running a child abuse program for the state of Maryland. I knew people around. I got a call from one of my board members who was involved. She said [inaudible 00:04:23], “This new thing that just created by Congress called the Protection and Advocacy Systems, and it’s supposed to investigate abuse and neglect of people with disabilities, and we need someone to take it over and make it work.” And I said, “I don’t know anything about disability. I have no contact with the disability community at all. I never had a disability. I really didn’t have any relatives with it, so this is way…” And they said, “No, no, we don’t care. We need someone who can get this thing together and make it work.” The child abuse program was another federal grant. It was winding down, so I was like, “Okay, I’ll try it.” And I was lucky, it was right around when 94-142 came into existence, the Rehab Act. So I was like, “Oh, these are interesting legal issues. I never knew about this.”
And then I went out to Rosewood State Hospital and the director there locked me in the room, the day room, with a bunch of adult, folks with developmental disabilities and tried to scare me, and it was like… Fortunately, I wasn’t scared. It was a great story. I walked in, these men were there, they looked around, there was a new person in the room. So they got all excited and they started coming towards me and it was like, “Ooh, this is interesting.” And I smiled and they all smiled and it was like… What’s when I realized that these… We tried to close Rosewood. We finally closed it in 20… I think it was 2010. I started in 1979, and it took 30 years to close that craphole down. So when I was there, there were 3000 people at Rosewood, and then eventually we kept pushing and pushing and pushing. So yeah. It was called MAUDD, the Maryland Advocacy Unit for the Developmentally Disabled, MAUDD. And I was executive director for three years.
Michelle Bishop:
I actually did not realize you started as the executive director. More than 3000 people in a single institution.
Curt Decker:
Oh, Willowbrook was 7,000.
Michelle Bishop:
What?
Curt Decker:
Those places are big.
Michelle Bishop:
I did not-
Curt Decker:
Very big, very big. I think Willowbrook, We always tell that story in the history of the P&As, it was the largest facility for people with intellectual disabilities in the world, I think. And a nightmare. You’ve seen that video a million times, I’m sure.
Michelle Bishop:
[inaudible 00:06:33], yeah.
Curt Decker:
Anyway. Yeah, so then I started, I spent some time… I left Maryland, but I was… Were working for NAPAS, but part-time I had other clients. I had clients in Annapolis I was representing. It’s now called AAIDD, but it was called AAMR at the time. I was working part-time, I was working on the CAP program, and I was sitting in the DC P&A office writing stuff, and we got the CAP program, and then we got the CAP grant, and then that was [inaudible 00:07:05]. They hired me full-time, and I think that’s when they hired Sally Rose and off we went. We had PAD and we had CAP, and then we got PAIMI and just kept going.
Michelle Bishop:
That’s funny. My mentor, when I started out independent living center in Missouri, and my mentor was one of the original disability lobbyists in Missouri, and he got into that work because he was working in independent living center, and they had a bill they wanted to get passed. They didn’t have a lobbyist then. So he was like, “I’ll go.” Went and found someone to sponsor the bill, and they were like, “We’ll take care of this.” And he went back to St. Louis and they didn’t do anything. And then of course, the bill went nowhere, and that was the one they learned the lesson that, if you’re not there-
Curt Decker:
That’s right.
Michelle Bishop:
Pushing for it, it’s not going to happen. And it sounds like the P&As were created, and then you understood that if you’re not there, somebody’s not in DC protecting what we have and building upon it, it’s not going to happen.
Curt Decker:
And that was exactly right, because [inaudible 00:08:07] I ran this child abuse program. I had done that for four years, and again, they were all over the country, a similar model. We’d have these meetings and I would say to people… And I helped organize an association of these child abuse programs, the same because they were federally funded. When I got to the P&A and I started talking to the other executive directors in the early days, ADD had money, and they brought us all together for a meeting. And it was like, who’s representing us in Washington? Well poor Marshawn, the ARC is the guy who’s [inaudible 00:08:44], “That doesn’t make any sense.”
We had big fights. The first fight was whether we should have a national association. There were a bunch of Executive Directors, “People will tell us what to do from Washington if we have that.” Well, they were right, that’s exactly what happened over the years we kept saying. “Here’s a new program. Here’s a new program. Here’s a voting program. Shut up. Take it whether you want it or not.” So we had that battle and we’ve created the national association.
Then we had to say, “We need dues, we need money.” And people, “Oh, no, no, no we can’t charge, we can’t use our federal money to pay dues. It’ll take money away from direct services.” We had the big fight about that. So then we created a due structure, and then that started getting us a little bit of money. That’s when they could hire me as a consultant, but each one of those developmental stages was a fight. And as you well know, we’ve been fighting ever since. Some of the P&As, “We don’t want this social security program.” “Shut up, take it. It’s great.”
Michelle Bishop:
I’m a little bit biased, but I’m glad that they took the voting program.
Curt Decker:
Yes, I guess I’m too. I worked on that. I worked really hard on that. It should have been $10 million. That was with the Help America Vote, but we only got five. What’s that turn now, about eight or nine?
Michelle Bishop:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s grown.
Curt Decker:
Yeah. Don’t get me going about history, I can go on for days.
Michelle Bishop:
Actually, that is somewhat the point of this-
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
That is the point, yes.
Curt Decker:
Right, right, right.
Michelle Bishop:
We’re doing a series about the fight for the ADA leading up to the anniversary of the ADA, and we were just hoping you could tell us about your experiences being a part of that fight to create the ADA, get it passed into law, get it enforced, all of that.
Curt Decker:
Sure. I can do that. Do we need to start free going here and just, or do you have specific questions or do you want me to start talking?
Michelle Bishop:
I feel like tell us a story.
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
Yeah, [inaudible 00:10:45] stories.
Curt Decker:
Okay. As I remember it, [inaudible 00:10:49] other people, the earliest iteration was the National Council put together a whole report on the need to… First I mean way back. We had the Rehab Act of 1974, where that banned discrimination based on federally-funded and federally-conducted programs. And from ’74 until about the late 80s that was in place. We and other people would use that to go after, again, federally-funded or federally-conducted. Somewhat broad because you had a lot of federal contractors. But people realized that that was, on the one hand, pretty narrow, and there was a whole other world out there that was not covered. So the National Council started with a proposal to do this, have a whole new discrimination bill to recover everything. It was a blueprint, it didn’t really go anywhere, but it got people organized around it.
Initially, it was controversial because the original thing was it was going to be a flat earth position that everything had to be accessible. And when we started meeting with people, I met with Weicker and Tom Harkin with Bobby Silverstein and some other people, and it was pretty clear that wasn’t going to go anywhere because people would say things like, “What do you do with the New York subway? What do you do with all of these old buildings, old… With Amtrak, you just can’t mandate automatically a flat earth.” So that changed. I think Pat Wright was someone who actually came up with this idea, “We’ll go from the flat earth to a line in the sand. We’re going to dry a line in the sand the day this thing passes. Everything new is going to have to be accessible, and we’ll just live with the old stuff. There’s just not much we can do about that, and maybe over years things will get better.”
And so we formed this coalition of all the disability groups. I always tell people that one of the things that I thought was terrific was that everyone sort of put down their cudgels and stopped fighting with each other and came together as a unified group. We created a grassroots group, we created a group in Washington that met regularly, and we started getting… Tony Coelho was taking the lead in the House, although he disappeared. I never ever figured out why he just left the Congress overnight. And so Steny Hoyer picked it up. And then of course, Weicker I think moved on. Lowell Weicker was very important to us as well. He’s the person I got the CAP program and the PAMI program from. He was a Republican from Connecticut. He had a child with a disability. Anyway.
So we began the process and it was a pretty hard slog in terms of… Because if you think about it, now what we’re doing is we’re taking on the entire country, every business, every major organization, and they’re organized. So you have the NFIB, the National Federation of Independent Business, you have the National Restaurant Association, you have Amtrak, you have the Catholic Church. The one story I always tell people about is that the reason why churches are not covered by the ADA is pretty much because the Catholic church came in and the Senate especially, I remember that hearing really well where they came in and said, “We do not want to be covered by the ADA. We would have to hire. For example, we will have to hire people with HIV, which means they’re gay and we don’t want to have gay employees.”
So there was this really interesting connection between homophobia and disability discrimination, and that’s one of the reasons why churches are not covered. And so today, the church across the street from my house in Baltimore, they just spent a bunch of money putting in ramps, but it was all voluntary because there’s no requirement. I think churches figured out that so many of their constituents are old that they better have things that are accessible. So that was one story.
As I remember, in trying to kill the bill, these national associations, the two big issues at the time, ’88, ’89, were AIDS and mental health. And so the National Restaurant Association came in and demanded to have their staff of restaurants excluded. And their theory was that… It sounds ridiculous now, but I spent many, many hours, we all did, talking about blood in the salad. The restaurant association said that, “If we have to hire or keep waiters staff that have HIV, they’re going to cut themselves, bleed in the salad, and they’ll give AIDS to our customers.” There was an amendment in the House to… They called it the Chapman Amendment to try to eliminate food workers from coverage of the ADA under this whole shibboleth of AIDS.
And so that was used as a sort of a stalking horse to try to throw the… People just wanted to kill the bill and so that was one way of trying to do that. The same thing was with mental health, [inaudible 00:15:59] have all these mentally ill people. Amtrak used that a lot. And we would get things like, “What are you talking about? You have people with mental illness on Amtrak now. You have no way of keeping them off.” So the idea that amendment.So then we got into all these side arguments. The Chapman Amendment passed the House, but we got it knocked out in the Senate. So that never happened. So there was no food worker exemption. Catholic Church won, but the restaurant Association did not.
I spent a lot of time with, I think Congressman Dingell, time on Amtrak. One of the things that Amtrak, and you probably know this from all the work that we did later on at NDRN, Amtrak came and said, “We’re old and broken, and we have all these terrible stations, and Congress doesn’t like us and they don’t give us enough money, and there’s no possible way we could make Amtrak accessible.” And we went back and forth and back and forth, and we said, “Okay, we hear you. So we’ll give you 20 years.”
There were various different negotiations like that where I think we gave over-the-road bus companies like Greyhound and Peter Pan five years, we gave Amtrak 20 years. And so there were all these… We gave city buses 30 days because the theory was that 30 days after passage, you did not have to ever… You could buy an accessible bus. And so they got one of the shortest timelines. But other people, over-the-road buses were like, “We don’t turn them over that often, so we need five years.” And as I think you probably know when we found out 19 years later, Amtrak did nothing. And that’s when we jumped in and did the report and started… And DOJ took the report and sued.
And then that’s when Ken and I started meeting with Amtrak quarterly and all of that, as I tried to get them to… But it was pretty outrageous that they let 19 years go by without… And some of that was… I always tell people that some of it was on us. We didn’t pay attention. We ignored them. And we thought, “Now they’re doing it” and we never really checked to see if they were. And when we finally found out they weren’t, it was so embarrassed. we should have stayed on top of that.
And then the other thing I remember is it really was a time when the entire disability community came together. And I do remember some very specific moments sitting in a congressman’s office with Lee Page from Paralyzed Veterans in a wheelchair, some blind people from NFB. And you’d get the congressman saying like, “You don’t want to cover HIV. You’ll be willing to take that out.” And they would say, “No, no. No, we’re not going to slice off unpopular disabilities from this thing. We’re going to stick together and we want the whole thing. We want everybody to be included. We’ll make these side deals depending on different industries, but basically…”
And I thought that was an incredible moment when the disability community really came together and unified and said, “We’re not going to throw different people off the boat because right now they’re very unpopular.”
Michelle Bishop:
That’s one of the things that’s always really incredible to me about the ADA is that it was this moment where the community stood together and the definition of what a disability is and who’s protected being so incredibly broad, I think is so powerful. I did not know. The homophobia that was wrapped up and all that is wild to me. I’m not eating a salad with anyone’s blood in it.
Curt Decker:
Right, exactly.
Michelle Bishop:
That’s when you send it back.
Curt Decker:
Right. That’s right. Or even with a hair or a roach for that matter, but it’s like… Yeah. And that was an side issue in there that [inaudible 00:19:47]. Because if you think about, you’re probably too young, but 1988, it was the height of the AIDS crisis. There was very little in the way of… I think ACT came around. We didn’t discover HIV until 85, and then it was like ’87, ’88, there was really no cure. It was pretty frightening and people were pretty hysterical about that. And so that seeped into this whole issue about disability discrimination. And of course, the mentally ill have always been unpopular and still are, and still scapegoated.
Michelle Bishop:
And you were at the signing of the ADA at the White House, weren’t you?
Curt Decker:
I was. Where was I? So the signing was quite an event, and it was Sandra Perino from the National Council on Disability and Evan Kemp, because people did still credit the National Council on Disability starting the ball by coming up with that. As I said early on, that original report, which I don’t think really ended… It was the basis, but the actual bill was quite a ways removed from that initial, we want the world concept. Those pictures of the signing, it was a great day. It was a great day, but it was hot. Every time I’ve ever gone back to the White House for subsequent celebrations, it was always in July, and we were just miserable. So I always tell people, “Let’s get the bill signed in October.”
The other thing that we did when we finally got… We lobbied to get a statue of Franklin Roosevelt in the Roosevelt Memorial in a wheelchair. The original design did not acknowledge at all that he had polio and that he was in wheelchair. And so we fought for that and we got that. And that ceremony was in December. I was like, “Here we go, [inaudible 00:21:38] freezing or boiling.”
Michelle Bishop:
So you need to plan bill passage like a wedding. You got to shoot for the spring or the fall.
Curt Decker:
Absolutely.
Michelle Bishop:
The White House, you got a suit on and everything. It can’t be/
Curt Decker:
Oh my God, one of the worst just dreadful. [inaudible 00:21:53]. Was it the 20th? Was it five years ago? It might’ve been earlier than that. And it’s 90 degrees. And they also had… Patti LaBelle was going to sing. And of course the president and everybody else is in the White House. Cool. We’re out on this lawn just dripping. And out comes Patti LaBelle, and we’re like, “Great, this is going to be fabulous.” She starts singing and she’s going to sing New Attitude and we’re all bopping around. And then she goes off the deep end about her sister, her husband, she’s my shero. It couldn’t have been worse. I dragged myself over to the W Hotel to get a drink, it was so silly. But you know, it was great. We were honored to be there. We should definitely all be there, but it doesn’t come without its downsides in July.
Let’s see, I’m trying to think of some other things that happened in the actual lobbying experience that were… Because the things that I worked on were the Chapman Amendment, the Amtrak stuff, tons of meetings [inaudible 00:22:54], a lot of the meetings with Harkin and Hatch to try to bring the Republicans over. So I don’t know. I don’t know if this is all helpful at all.
Michelle Bishop:
No, it is. This is amazing. This is stuff that we want to record and get down because like you said, Stephanie and I, we weren’t there. I only know a bit through legend.
Curt Decker:
Yeah, no, it was a major… It still needs to be enforced. I think Maryland just ended up suing the Baltimore City for curb cuts because things are still bad in lot of places and of course Amtrak just blew us off. The other things that are interesting, airlines are not covered because there was a separate Air Carrier Access Act that had passed earlier and that Ken and I did some reg neg or regulation negotiations with the airlines. Housing’s not in there because we’d gotten disability into the Fair Housing Act in 1988, I think. And that was an interesting experience as well. That’s when I ran into Wade Henderson for the first time, and he was adamant about… His position, which I understand was you can’t open up the Fair Housing Act to add disability. If you do, other forces will come forward and try to rip the whole thing apart.
So he was pretty anti adding a disability, but we went forward and we got it and we were able to save it. But that’s one of the reasons went to Eric and I was like, “The DD council, for example, wants to reauthorize the DD Act.” And it’s like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, don’t go there because they’ll leave you alone, they’ll come right after the P&As. They’ll come after the access authority, they’ll come after the legal authority. You do not want to open up this bill.” So I understand the theory about not opening up established law for a good reason.
And that was what happened. You probably know that we had to do the ADA Amendments Act because we started getting… You pass a bill and it looks great, and you think you’ve covered all the basis, and then it goes into the courts. And then over the next three or four or five years, we were starting getting one horrible opinion after another. And Sandra Day O’Connor was the culprit in the Supreme Court as it came to… Let me see if I get this right. The bill came to Supreme Court. Oh, I know what happened.
So the case was there were two women pilots that flew regional airlines and they wanted to be promoted to the big airplanes which was where the money was, but you had to have 20/20 vision and they were denied. Their lawyer brought lawsuits under the ADA saying, “It’s discrimination.” In the surface, it wasn’t… If you were a pilot of a big airplane and you needed to wear glasses, you’re fine, but you couldn’t get to be a pilot if you needed glasses. So it goes to the Supreme Court and we’re hysterical because it’s like, “We do not want to get this bill before the Supreme Court.” And sure enough, Sandra Day O’Connor rules that if, yes, they have a disability in terms of poor eyesight, but they can ameliorate the disability by putting on glasses. And if you can fix the disability, you’re not covered. That just blew the whole employment section of the ADA out the window.
Because think about it, you’re mentally ill, you take lithium, you cured disability. Getting in a wheelchair, “Oh, you’re no longer disabled because you’re ambulatory.” The ramifications were just stupendous about being able to fix your disability and not therefore not being covered.
So we had to go back and after telling the whole disability community for years, “Do not open up this bill. Don’t you dare. You know there’s things we’d like to change. No way. Because we open this up and all those things that we beat back originally in 1989, ’90 will come back to haunt us.” But then we had a reverse course because this was so bad and just wiped out all the protections of the ADA that we would go back. I fell blue myself. I think Andy Imparato who was working… I know where he was at the time. Was he at APD?
We met and we got the Chamber of Commerce in because they were relatively supportive the first time around. And we renegotiated, Jennifer Mathis renegotiated. Leadership Conference was involved and came up with a definition of disability that said if you had these conditions, you were covered. And it didn’t make any difference to what you did. You put on glasses, you wrote a crutch, or you had drugs or diabetes. It was like, wait a second, [inaudible 00:27:38] tell me the… And people with epilepsy were getting thrown out of court because, “Oh, you can take your seizure medication so you’re no longer a person with a disability.” It was devastating all based on a pair of eyeglasses.
Michelle Bishop:
I actually did not know much of any of that. I want to be honest, I didn’t know any of that. And as a wearer of glasses, I am offended.
Curt Decker:
Yeah. To me, what’s interesting about that story is you work on a bill, you think you’ve got it covered, you pass it, great, fabulous, big celebration, go to the White House, and then it goes into the world and it starts getting used and things start to happen and it starts going to courts and you get the backlash. We’ve got huge backlash about back problems. A lot of people, a lot of them, not great lawyers, you come in, “I was fired for my job.” “Oh, why?” “My boss.” “Do you have a disability?” “I have bad back.” “Okay, you were fired because you’re disabled.” And so we got a whole bunch of cases in the early years of these, mostly back issues, but lawyers who were looking for a way to defend their client would try to glom… Even though the fact that they were fired had nothing to do with any impairment, they were fired because they’re a lousy worker, but that’s what lawyers…
And then we started getting this really bad reputation. The bill was getting a reputation for being all these insignificant cases and it was being abused, gone to a whole thing around accessibility stuff with restaurants. I remember was a big hoo-ha with Clint Eastwood who owned a restaurant out in California, and he came out and he went to Congress. And of course, there’s nothing worse in the world than to watch a congressional hearing with a movie star. These congressmen just fall apart and just lap it up. That’s why people are always trying to get movie stars to come and testify because the whole committee shows up, they just drool over them. And he got a lot of play about the abuse of the ADA making his restaurant bathrooms accessible. Shut up. And there were attempts at trying to amend the ADA around that as well.
So just getting it passed ain’t enough. You’ve got to watch it and see how it spins out into the world and how it gets used well, not so well, abused. And then you have to deal with the backlash. And the thing, as I said, the… I think it was ’86 or ’96, the ADA Amendments Act. You go back in and try to clean that up. And then we had to do the stuff with Amtrak, still are. I think Kenneth is better now, is still probably meeting with them. So that’s what I know and that’s what I can remember anyway.
Michelle Bishop:
I also think these days, there’s so much wild misunderstanding about the ADA. I have heard people say, “Oh, you have to hire people with disability, so you’re going to have a blind person drive a school bus?” That’s not how it works. [inaudible 00:30:34], “Oh, you’re going to have a service boa constrictor and bring them into a restaurant?” That’s not how any of this works.
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
[inaudible 00:30:40] I want to drive a school bus. Just kidding.
Curt Decker:
No, that’s… [inaudible 00:30:47]. Let me tell you about this. So one of the things we did do in 1989 is because we had the experience of the ’74 Rehab Act. So all these concepts of reasonable accommodation, essential function of the job, readily available, readily achievable, these were all concepts that had developed all through the 70s and 80s about how you interpreted the nondiscrimination. As employment, you had to be able to do the essential function of the job. if you’re blind, you can’t drive a bus, so you cannot use the ADA to have a blind bus driver, you had to be able to do the essential function.
So what we said, just like that whole story about the flat earth going to, “Okay, can’t do that, we’ll draw a line in the sand and go forward.” We also talked about putting the doughnut over the hole. The ADA was going to be the doughnut that sat over the concepts of the 74 Rehab Act, which we thought was smart because it was like these are tried and true concepts, reasonable accommodation had been out there for decades, over a decade, and so did readily achievable. And these were the things that were the balance, the statute that something had to be readily to make it accessible, and if it was going to cost a zillion dollars and bankrupt. So if you’re a bodega on the corner and you now had to make your store accessible, but it was going to bankrupt you, that was not readily achievable. You weren’t covered and you didn’t have to do that. If you were a big corporation, your ability to do readily achievable was a lot greater. So there was trying to strike these balances.
And the same thing with reasonable accommodation. The accommodation had to be reasonable. You just couldn’t demand to do things, accommodations in the workplace that… I’ve never been a fan of Mother Teresa because she fought us on not wanting to put an elevator in her businesses. It was a compromise and it was a reasonable bill trying to use these concepts that we thought people did fight back obviously. But it was a good, I think, strategy to build on what had already existed and not come up with all kinds of new weird things. Because as I said earlier, we were going after the entire country, every doctor’s office, every dry cleaning establishment, every restaurant, you name it. And it was going to be covered under the ADA, and that was terrifying to a lot of businesses.
Michelle Bishop:
Okay, I’m thinking about it now. I’m about to look it up. I’m pretty sure the Mother Teresa I remember from my youth was using a wheelchair at some point. Is that true? I’m wondering if that changed her stance.
Curt Decker:
I doubt. I don’t know. Michelle, I really can’t tell, but I know she had two-story buildings and she refused to put elevators in there. But you know we always said… And the other thing with things had to be like the program accessibility. So if you had a program, if you had a building without an elevator, you just had to make sure the program was available. So you bring the program down to the first floor in order to accommodate a person with a disability. So there were these kinds of trying to come up with some reasonable [inaudible 00:34:13] head off opposition, but two, to be fair and not bankrupt places.
Then we had the other abuse was these drive-by lawsuits, you probably remember. I don’t know if they’re still going on, but again, some fairly unscrupulous law firms would go get a person with a disability, travel around to a whole bunch of places, liquor stores, restaurants, and they’d go in and they’d say, “Oh, your bathroom isn’t fully accessible.” And the restaurant would say, “Okay, thank you. I’ll fix it.” They fix it and then they’d get a letter from the lawyer saying, “You owe $2,500 for attorney’s fees.” They would do that like 50 or 60 times. They did a lot in California, a lot in Florida.
So where’d the businesses go? They went right to their congressmen and said, “We’re being ripped off. We made the fix. And yes, if we went to court, we would win, but it’s going to cost me $5,000 to hire a lawyer to fight it and this guy wants $2,500. I’ll just pay it and get my money back.” Then we started getting all these congresspeople who wanted to amend the ADA because of all these… It was all these frivolous lawsuits. They weren’t frivolous, there was a violation, but it was fixed. So it was just a scam by a couple of law firms who saw an opportunity to… You always have to be on guard for these kind… Everything can get abused. The tax code’s abused. Everything is abused. You don’t throw it out, but you try to deal with it. I remember calling a couple of those of law firms, trying to talk them to negotiate with them about, “You’re killing us here and giving the ADA a really bad name.” They didn’t care, they were making money.
Michelle Bishop:
Even though you accidentally, it sounds like, fell into working in the disability rights movement a long time ago, it clearly became a life’s passion. What do you see as the new frontier in disability rights? I think the ADA has changed so much about the lives of people with disabilities. It can’t be overstated how incredibly important the ADA has been, but a lot has changed since 1990. In your mind, what’s next? Where do we go from here?
Curt Decker:
It’s a good question. I’ve been retired now, and so I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about these issues. I have a little bit of contact with a few people out there once in a while. Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how.. By the way, you’re absolutely right. It changed the face of the country. As I said, for all of the downsides and fights and abuse that happens, it has been a phenomenal piece of legislation. I think it’s something like George H. Walker Bush, that it was his biggest accomplishment. It really was an impressive, massive kind of thing that really changed the whole face of society. Not that there aren’t curb cuts that need to be done and “blah blah blah”
One thing I would think about is all this, and I don’t know much about it, but all AI and all these new technologies, making sure that they adjust and adapt. And I think the disability community has to be pretty vigilant. I have to laugh, the fact that Musk and the president wants to do self-driving cars, that’s a good thing. We want self-driving cars so people who are blind can have cars. That would be cool. I’m happy to see the paper straws go away because we objected to the paper straws doing away with plastic straws because people in wheelchairs and quadriplegics needed something stronger, they depended on to survive. So who knows, in a weird way, a couple of their little stupid things could actually have some benefits.
The future of the disability stuff, it’ll be interesting. Technology helping people walk who are wheelchair-bound, what impact that’s going to have on. Is that going to be considered no longer disability? So the technology could have a pro and con, and I think that’d be something that we have to watch carefully. Although right now the most immediate threat is… Maybe we don’t even talk about the future, I’m going to talk about next week when they do away with the Department of Education and screw up the IDA. The EEOC has been devastated, and the Department of Labor’s discrimination and… I did a lot of work with them trying to make sure they were going after 14(c) violations and also just in general discrimination based on disability. And so a lot of the, what’s going to happen with the disability rights section, Department of Justice.
So it’s nice to think about the future, but let’s talk about… The future as in next month when they try to… And it’s really odd, we survived pretty well during the first Trump administration. He didn’t care. We were not a base issue. They were on an immigration and they left us alone. And we stayed under the shadows as you know. I couldn’t believe we got the social security bill, one of the biggest programs we had in the Trump administration. He didn’t know what he was signing, thank God. And I was having a little bit of a crisis of conscience when I was like, “We finally got a pass. And oh God, if he does a signing ceremony, do I have to go there and stand behind him? I’ll spit.” He was not going to do that. He didn’t care about disability. Now, all of a sudden, it does seem like…
And again, I don’t know if it’s so disability-focused, it’s going to have impact. If you do away with the Department of Education, what’s the Department of Education? It’s Title I and IDA, are two of their major biggest programs. So I see Carol Dobak a lot here. She goes to the wine shop. You’ve probably heard this story. I used to jump on her when I was working, and then I still see her every once in a while and say, “What’s going on?” See what’s happening with OSERS and RSA? She did think they were going to lose a lot of their probationary employees. Yeah. So I do think there’s a very real, very current threat right there. And then if we can weather this storm, think about your question about where are things going to go in the future?
Michelle Bishop:
I think you’re right as well that disability rights is such an interesting movement because our opponents and our champions always come from both sides of the aisle.
Curt Decker:
Right. Yeah.
Michelle Bishop:
And I feel like that’s really unique.
Curt Decker:
And we were very careful to stay nonpartisan. That was always a mantra of CCD and all the other. All of us was like, “Just don’t make this a partisan issue or we’ll lose because we need those Republicans.” And it worked pretty well, but I don’t know what’s going to happen now, so where are these people… Where is Susan Collins and all these people about IDA? [inaudible 00:41:24].
Michelle Bishop:
We did actually do an episode of this podcast with Stephanie behind the wheel of a self-driving car.
Curt Decker:
Great. Yeah, so you have to give credit where credit is due. So plastic straws and self-driving cars might be a legacy of the Trump administration. [inaudible 00:41:42]. As you said, I dropped into the disability world unplanned and without any previous history and got very excited about… From a lawyer’s point of view, there were some really great legal issues. But then just in general, I’ve always been a civil rights-y kind of guy. I was lucky that so early on this was a major civil rights issue along with race and LGBT, and spent my life doing that. And I’m really grateful that I didn’t go to New York as a corporate lawyer, which is what Cornell Law School told me I should do. So I got saved. I was very lucky.
Michelle Bishop:
I can’t imagine you being a New York corporate lawyer, to be honest. This was totally the right path.
Curt Decker:
It turned out it was for me. That’s the other story I tell people all the time. When I was in Cornell, it was a very conservative law school. All the classes were tax business, they’re corporate and it was no… Not like now, law schools have clinics with civil rights clinics and [inaudible 00:42:43] used to have an LGBT clinic at Georgetown. Nothing. So I just didn’t know that I could be a public interest lawyer. And then I had dodged the draft and I joined VISTA, and they sent me to Baltimore Legal Aid. And that first year was like, “Oh, I didn’t know you could do this. I didn’t know you could represent poor people and go around and fight Medicaid system,” and all that stuff. And it was like, “This is kind of cool, and I’m really good at it.” And they offered me a job and I stayed, never went back. I’m sitting in my Baltimore house right now, never went back to New York, and it was a good thing.
Michelle Bishop:
I feel like that is everything I can think of to ask about. Stephanie, did we miss anything?
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
No, I think that we covered it. But yeah, thank you so, so much, Curt, for being willing to talk about your lived experience during the passage of the ADA and just giving us some insights to share with our listeners, we totally appreciate it and we appreciate your time today. It’s really been great. And like I said, I love stories, so thank you so much for sharing your story with us.
Curt Decker:
Sure. I enjoyed it. It was really fun. Brought back a lot of memories, so great. Good luck, and I hope things get better, and I hope… Very great. Good talking to you all. It was fun.
Jack Rosen:
It’s always great getting to catch up with Curt. He has such a wealth of knowledge about the disability rights movement, how they accomplished the passage of the ADA, and so many other milestones for this movement. That is fascinating, the part about blood in the salad and how they just showed solidarity and did not waver on these issues. It’s really impressive.
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
Yeah, I’m here for it. And Curt is such a great storyteller as well. So just listening to his insight, it was really, really great to get to hear from him. You know what else is great?
Jack Rosen:
We should have asked Curt to stay for this part. I would love to see his reaction?
Michelle Bishop:
Yeah, yeah. We shouldn’t let him go. But Stephanie, please tell us your joke of the month.
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
Oh yeah. Of course, absolutely. How much do rainbows weigh?
Jack Rosen:
How much do rainbows weigh?
Michelle Bishop:
Do you find these on Popsicle sticks?
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
Sometimes I get them from other sources, yes. Sometimes they’re originals. This one is from source, but I thought it was fun. So we’re doing it.
Jack Rosen:
Okay. How much do rainbows weigh?
Michelle Bishop:
I got nothing.
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
You ready? Jack, do you have a guess? Come on.
Michelle Bishop:
We never have a guess. Somebody has to have a guess.
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
Right? Michelle, you used to guess all of the right answers.
Michelle Bishop:
I know. That was a scary time in my life. I have no idea. Stephanie, please tell us.
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
Okay. How much do rainbows weigh? Not much, they’re actually pretty light.
Jack Rosen:
I like that one. That one’s funny.
Michelle Bishop:
That one’s not bad. That one’s not bad.
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
Thank you.
Michelle Bishop:
We’re doing a series for the anniversary month of the ADA. Does that mean we’re going to have multiple jokes this month?
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
Yes.
Michelle Bishop:
Oh.
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
And there’s a very special joke, I believe, that’s probably coming to you at the end of the month. So stay tuned.
Michelle Bishop:
I’m sure everyone’s so excited.
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
Yes. I’m excited. I almost told it this episode, but we’ve got to give the people anticipation, the two listeners to this podcast.
Michelle Bishop:
All two of our listeners I’m sure are very excited to hear this joke. Jack, where can people] find us on social media?
Jack Rosen:
You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, Threads. I think that’s all of them. Maybe we’ll make a MySpace.
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
Oh my gosh.
Jack Rosen:
Write in. Write in to [email protected] if you think we should make a MySpace. Until next time, folks.
Stephanie Flynt McEben:
Bye.
