I don't know if I agree with this wholeheartedly.  Just another post to get
y'all talking...



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Judge Roberts, Hurricane Katrina and Americans with Disabilities



Building a Supreme Court to Excuse Our Nation's Neglect of the Poor and
Disenfranchised



By Jim Ward, Founder and President



ADA Watch/National Coalition for Disability Rights



New Orleans is America's canary in the mineshaft. Ideologies of
privatization that incapacitate effective government -permitting the
privileged to save themselves while leaving the poor clinging to roofs -must
now be challenged. This disaster is a chilling reminder of what happens when
government fails to protect its citizens, and it is imperative that
Americans demand accountability.



Terry Lynn Karl Professor of Political Science Stanford University September
8, 2005



(Washington, DC) We did not see news reports on Hurricane Katrina showing
mass looting by people with disabilities, did we?



Given the chance, perhaps this would have been so.



Instead, we witnessed people without legs -unable to reach the rooftops
-floating in the storm waters; Americans in wheelchairs "rescued" and then
left to fry and die in the scorching sun; people with epilepsy and diabetes
separated from vital medications; and citizens in nursing homes left behind
to drown.



And we saw many, many poor people.



Louisiana has a shameful poverty rate of 24 percent. There and throughout
the United States, people with disabilities are among the poorest of the
poor. According to the 2000 Census, people with severe disabilities comprise
roughly half of all working-age Americans living in poverty. A staggering
one third of adults with disabilities live in households with total income
of $15,000 or less.



Hurricane Katrina has blown the cover off of America's crumbling physical
infrastructure and our weakened ability to respond to the needs of even our
most vulnerable citizens. Those quick to write off the results of this storm
as a blameless natural disaster fail to grasp how our Country has been
weakened by the Free Market solutions of economic Libertarianism. Katrina
has dramatically illustrated the failure of a "privatized," "outsourced,"
and "downsized" government to protect its citizens from a storm -let alone
from the poverty and decaying infrastructure that proceeded it.



Americans were rightly angry to learn of the lack of experience and
credentials held by Michael Brown, the head of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA). But, rather than the incompetence of one, we are
witnessing the impact of an ideological scheme to undo the federal safety
net and roll back basic protections for those most in need. This was made
all too clear by the words of Brown's predecessor at FEMA and former
campaign manager for President Bush, Joe Allbaugh, who while initiating
steps towards the privatization of FEMA, declared it an "oversized
entitlement program" and said that the "business of government is not to
provide services."



In the aftermath of this tragedy, critics of the President fail us when they
rail about political cronyism or the length of his summer vacation.

During a time of crisis, these arguments seem partisan, petty and
opportunistic to most Americans. These criticisms especially distract from
seeing New Orleans as the end result of Mr. Bush's carefully calculated
plans to gut the Federal government by filling it with ideologues who
despise its very existence. In this context, the problems of FEMA, which
tragically and disproportionately are impacting people with disabilities,
African Americans, and the poor, illustrate just what has gone wrong with
our government and they neither begin nor end with Hurricane Katrina.



People with disabilities are among the many who have been awaiting the
expression of outrage from our elected leaders, the Media and our fellow
citizens about the systematic plundering of Medicaid, Medicare, Social
Security, public housing, public education, and other vital programs at the
direction of this Administration and Congress all in the name of doing away
with "Big Government."



The appointment of individuals who share contempt for our government if not
of the citizens they serve has been pervasive in this Administration.

The result has been the proliferation of Federal agencies and a Federal
judiciary which operate to grease the skids of Free Market libertarianism
and to release government from any responsibility to its own citizens.



A few examples specifically impacting people with disabilities include:



* John Ashcroft, who as Senator took a lead role in trying to weaken the due
process protections afforded children and youth with disabilities by the
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), was appointed Attorney
General and led the Justice Department in siding with big business and
against workers with disabilities.



* Gerald Reynolds, recess appointed by President Bush to run the Office of
Civil Rights at the Department of Education (60 percent of OCR cases are
disability-related). Reynolds told the U.S. Civil Rights Commission that the
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is one of those "statutes and
regulations [that] are going to retard economic development in urban centers
across the country." (April 5, 1997)



* Jeffrey Sutton, nominated by Mr. Bush to a lifetime position on the Sixth
Circuit Court of Appeals. Sutton successfully argued before the Supreme
Court that state employees who suffered discrimination could not sue under
the ADA to seek damages from the state.



* Eugene Scalia, Bush's controversial recess appointee and former Solicitor
at the Department of Labor. Scalia has made a career out of representing big
business against employees and has sought to limit the scope of the ADA. He
has called federal ergonomics regulations proposed to prevent disabilities
in the workplace "junk science."



* Linda Chavez, Bush's first pick for Secretary of Labor, ridiculed the ADA
as 'special treatment in the name of accommodating the disabled.'"

(AP, Jan. 5, 2001)



* D. Brooks Smith, a conservative activist nominated by Bush to the 3rd
Circuit Court of Appeals, dismissed charges against institutions in
Pennsylvania where horrific care of individuals with mental disabilities
included flies and ants on food, maggots and ants on residents, residents
sitting in wheelchairs for hours without having their diapers changed,
injuries due to neglect, overmedicating, and more. Judge Smith concluded
that the State had no constitutional obligation to "enhance the resident's
level of functioning."



Enter Judge John Roberts.



President Bush's nomination of Judge John Roberts to Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court is in so many ways consistent with his pattern of filling
government agencies and the courts with those who will aid in the
dismantling of our Federal government and of the laws protecting people with
disabilities, women, and other minorities.



For more than 20 years, from cases including a deaf 8 year-old trying to get
a school to provide her an interpreter, to an adult with a serious
disability trying to keep her job on a Toyota assembly line, Judge Roberts
has consistently advocated for the weakening of legal protections under the
Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, the
Child Welfare Act, the Medicaid Act and more.



Because so many of Roberts documents are being withheld from the public and
from the Senators who will vote on his nomination we can only assume that
more evidence exists that would tie Roberts to this campaign against the
Federal Government's role in protecting its citizens. Recently released
documents, in fact, revealed his role in attempting to undermine the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and describe how he uncritically
passed along demands that the Reagan administration repeal a requirement of
government contractors to hire the "handicapped."



We also know that the Administration attempted to cloud Roberts association
with the Federalist Society an organization whose leading members have led
the charge against the ADA and other civil rights protections presumably
because its members are at the forefront of the movement to narrowly
interpret the constitutional powers of Congress and to decimate New Deal
protections they deride as symptoms of the "Nanny State."



Judge John Robert previously declared that the Rehnquist Court was "not
conservative enough" -this after the term in which the Court struck down
laws such as the Violence Against Women Act and refused to hear complaints
under the Age Discrimination Act. If this right-wing judicial activism was
not enough for Judge Roberts, just how far will a "Chief Justice Roberts" go
in dismantling protections passed by our elected representatives in
Congress?



Many will claim that ideology does not matter in the selection of judges.

Clearly, however, President Bush's choice of judicial nominees to the lower
courts, and now to the Supreme Court, reflect this Administration's contempt
for government and for Congress's role in passing protections for the
disadvantaged. In fact, those seeking to remake the court from a protectors
of the people to protector of the powerful, do believe that ideology is
important. A 1988 report of the Reagan Justice Department affirmed that:



"There are few factors that are more critical to determining the course of
the Nation, and yet are more often overlooked, than the values and
philosophies of the men and women who populate the third co-equal branch of
the national government--the federal judiciary."



For many, the confirmation of Judge John Roberts is already a done deal.

It is not enough, however, for our elected leaders and others to stand aside
and say that Roberts is a conservative replacing a conservative on the
Court. We must examine how the Rehnquist Court has already stripped us of
civil rights protections under laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act
and determine in the midst of the failings related to our government's
response in New Orleans what kind of America will result from Judge Roberts'
record and ideology.



Indeed, Americans should call on the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary
to make this confirmation process a national debate on the role of
government in America. New Orleans has uncovered the results of 20 years of
a prevailing political ideology that has denigrated government's role in
meeting the needs of its citizens.



Now is the time to openly debate the values that are going to shape our
government for the next 20 or 30 years.