AT Disability K - Michigan 7 2023 CFLMP

Aff Answers
Policy/Law Good
Policy key
Disability must be politicized---this is the only way to secure collective rights---the retreat from politics reifies ableist tropes of charity politics and naively tries to wish problems away
Ruckelshaus 17, (Jay Ruckelshaus is a Rhodes Scholar and graduate student in political theory at the University of Oxford, and the founder and president of Ramp Less Traveled, a nonprofit organization that helps students with spinal cord injuries pursue higher education, The Non-Politics of Disability, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/opinion/denouncing-trump-wont-help-disability-rights.html)
Disability rights enjoy a seemingly ironclad moral consensus, an ostensible unanimity that is striking given America’s entrenched polarization and the antagonism surrounding other identity movements. Many are wary of L.G.B.T. rights or the Black Lives Matter movement, but it seems beyond the pale — almost cruel — to oppose disability rights. Nobody wants to be anti-disability. Initially, this harmony would seem helpful. Free from partisan discord, advancements for the approximately 57 million Americans with disabilities should be easier to achieve, borne aloft by the wings of certain progress. Why, then, do rampant unemployment and educational disparities endure, and why does success remain the exception? I think part of the reason is the insulation of our pro-disabled political consensus. Its logic is rooted not in any deep belief in the equal worth of citizens with disabilities, but rather in a general aversion to disability. This is related to the charity impulse that has always surrounded disability — and has constrained liberation efforts by assuming that inequities are unfortunate but natural realities to be mitigated through compassion, rather than politically structured injustices. There is also a profound lack of disabled people in the public sphere, meaning any substantive discussion that does occur is extremely rare. I suspect many people I talk to about disability maintain an implicit hope that, if they nod as vigorously as possible, the issue will simply go away. In this way, support for disability rights is similar to the act of expressing perfunctory thanks to military veterans. It temporarily absolves us of the responsibility to address the heart of the matter. Moreover, the apparent moral consensus may be mostly superficial. In trying to enact accessibility, disability advocates encounter increasing resistance as the effort and costs involved in proposals come closer to being realized. (Consider the neighborhood store that decides it’s just too costly to install a ramp, or the community lecture that excludes deaf attendees by refusing to hire a sign-language interpreter.) Instead of facilitating change, false unity actually restrains change. It stifles the more substantive conversations true progress requires. And our inability to speak honestly — and contentiously — about disability shows how the politics of disability is in this sense non-political. We are the worse for it. In addition to greater participation in the public sphere, true progress for citizens with disabilities will require a willingness to confront the issues head-on, even when — especially when — citizens disagree on competing solutions. We must politicize disability — not in the cable-news, grandstanding kind of way, but in the term’s more formal sense. The work of the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe can help illuminate what’s at stake. Mouffe begins with the premise that human relations are inherently antagonistic: Political change always requires controversial transfers in power or prestige, and it is an illusion to imagine politics without confrontation. Per this “agonistic” conception of democracy, a healthy political order is one that prefers vigorous, good-faith argumentation to complacent consensus. Until we publicly recognize real disagreements surrounding disability and accessibility, Mouffe would insist, we are doomed to a vacuous, empty debate that is neither political nor productive. Recall the Kovaleski incident. I’m not suggesting that the abhorrence of Mr. Trump’s actions is open to legitimate questioning. But in their forcefully reassuring comments and messages, my friends prevented any serious discussion of disability at the level where reasonable disagreement does exist. Where will the money come from to fund disability employment schemes? How do we even define “disability”? Despite — and, I would argue, partly because of — the broad condemnation of Mr. Trump for his insensitivity, there was no substantive public discussion of such issues. You may be thinking, haven’t we had enough politics lately? Maybe it’s a blessing that disability isn’t as political as it might be; it avoids the drama and messiness that now seem to define our common life. Avoiding politics might be possible if disability were an exclusively private affair. But it is fundamentally a public concern, affecting everyone directly or indirectly and revealing our obligations to one another as members of a democratic society. Issues of accessibility can be fully addressed only through public institutions and collective effort. For the disability community, there is no answer but politics.
Empirics go Aff -- The system can be used to help disabled folk.
Jenks 19 (2019. Andrew Jenks -- a Paralympian and scholar-advocate in the fields of Disability Politics, Equity & Access in Higher Education. “Crip theory and the disabled identity: why disability politics needs impairment”) //Don Markos
What are disability politics? How do they relate to my central theses: impairment matters in disability politics and social deconstruction obfuscates and potentially harms disability politics? This section first provides a brief over- view of the disability rights movement and the simultaneous evolution of lit- erature in disability studies. This is done in order to show how disability studies scholarship from the 1980s and 1990s reflects the social movements of the past and present. The section then moves to McRuer’s book and the intriguing and insightful parallels he draws between the ways in which disabled and queer (or queer/disabled) bodies have been created over time. Based on interpretivist inquiry and recreation of genealogies of disability, one can learn a great deal about the social construction of disability and deviancy, as well as practices of control over those bodies labeled as such. The disability rights movement in liberal welfare states The story of disability politics is often one told about shared experiences of oppression, marginalization, and a struggle which cross-cuts impairment groups. Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) and other cross-disability organizations like the American Association of People with Disabilities or the Disability Rights Education Defense Fund certainly have impacted positive changes in the broader disability community around questions of accessibility, accommodation, and anti-discrimination. Most notably, members of these groups impacted passage of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the ADA of 1990, and the ADA Amendments Act of 2008. Oliver and Barnes (2012) discuss the rise of a broadly focused, loosely associated Disabled People’s Movement in the 1970s to its height in the 1990s as a formative era in what can be thought of as the beginning of an era of ‘disability politics.’ Figure 1 delineates different ‘eras’ of understandings and reactions to disability by the state and later by activists.
Disability activists have always used policy to incorporate successful frameworks for the disabled – anything else fails to incorporate politicd and confines movements
Bagenstos - 03[Samuel R.; Feburary; Samuel Robert Bagenstos is the professor of Law at the University of Michigan, specializes in constitutional and civil rights litigation and received their education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Harvard Law School they are an American attorney and academic who is the General Counsel of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. From January 2021 until June 2022, he served as the general counsel for the Office of Management and Budget. Accessed 6/28/2023 The Americans with Disabilities Act as Welfare Reform https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1365&context=wmlr – rrm]
If the restrictive decisions interpreting the ADA can be understood as implementing the welfare reform argument that formed such a significant part of the legislative case for the ADA, the question remains: Where did that argument come from? One obvious possibility might be that the welfare reform argument was a purely opportunistic way of hoodwinking conservatives into supporting a fundamentally radical law. As I will discuss below, there is something to that suggestion: Disability rights advocates increasingly relied on welfare reform arguments as the political climate turned toward fiscal retrenchment and against extension of civil rights policies in the late 1970s and the 1980s.292 There can be little doubt that those advocates believed that their increasing reliance on such arguments represented the most effective strategy for appealing to the conservatives, neoconservatives, and neoliberals who now held the balance of power in Washington. But this is not simply a tale of activists trapped by their own rhetoric. The welfare reform argument for the ADA was not simply an opportunistic tool to obtain the support of newly-ascendant conservatives in Washington. Rather, it derived from and drew heavily on a movement indigenous to the disability community-a movement that was a key staging ground for and that provided important leadership to the broader disability rights movement. That movement, the independent living movement, incorporated several strands of thinking that were notable for their ambivalence 291. See discussion supra Part II.A. 292. See infra Part III.B.1. 20031 985 WILLIAM AND MARY LAW REVIEW toward disability benefits programs.29 The welfare reform arguments for the ADA picked up on and extended the criticisms of benefits programs that were immanent in the ideology of many (though not all) independent living advocates. To the extent that the welfare reform argument has led to undesirably narrow interpretations of the ADA, the problem may not lie solely with the courts-or even with disability rights advocates' tactical choice to use that argument to sell the ADA. The problem may instead lie within a set of foundational ideas of the disability rights movement itself. As I hope to show, the independent living movement reflects a curious combination of libertarian and social democratic thought. Where, as in the selling of the ADA, the libertarian aspects of independent living thinking receive the lion's share of emphasis, the result likely undermines the ability to achieve the goals virtually all disability rights activists share. In this Part, I elaborate that argument. Part III.A provides an overview of the independent living movement, with a particular focus on its origins and the ambivalence it expresses toward disability benefits programs. In Part III.B, I argue that disability rights activists increasingly adopted the idea of"independent living" as what social movement theorists call a "collective action frame." The welfare reform argument represented a particular, hardly inevitable, instantiation of that frame, one that strongly resonated with both conservative legislators and people with disabilities themselves. Useful as it was for the emergent disability rights movement, however, the move to the welfare-reform/independentliving frame had a cost, which I discuss in Part III.C. Because much of the agenda of the disability rights and independent living movements can be readily characterized as a call for costly redistribution and constant government intervention on behalf of people with disabilities, a focus on avoiding dependency costs can be used to delegitimize and undermine that agenda. That, I fear, is a significant part of what has happened in the interpretation of the ADA. 293. See Judith E. Heumann, Independent Living Movement: Organizing for an Active, Disabled OldAge (1994), at http:/www~independentliving.org/toolsforpower/tools28.htm (last visited Jan. 28, 2003). 986 [Vol. 44:921 THE ADA AS WELFARE REFORM A. The Independent Living Movement 1. The Origins of the Independent Living Movement Most knowledgeable observers trace the origins of the independent living movement to the early 1970s.294 Around that time, people with disabilities in a number of communities around the country came together in local organizations known as "independent living centers." The first independent living center, the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, California, began as an organization of students with disabilities at the University of California.29 The first of those students, Ed Roberts, was admitted to the university in 1962. As a result of polio, contracted when he was fourteen, Roberts used a wheelchair and spent substantial amounts of time in an iron lung. Although the university initially sought to revoke its acceptance of Roberts when it learned of his disability, the institution relented after a doctor at the Cowell Hospital, located on campus, proposed to house him on a floor of that facility. Several other college-aged people with disabilities who used wheelchairs learned of Roberts' arrangement and, in the next few years, obtained admission to the university as well. Like Roberts, these students were housed in the Cowell Hospital. Perhaps owing to the political consciousness of the times, particularly on the Berkeley campus, the students who resided at Cowell Hospital began to see their situation in largely political terms.2 They organized a political group called the "Rolling Quads" and urged the university to eliminate the architectural barriers that prevented wheelchair users from moving freely about the campus. They also organized a student-run class entitled "Strategies of Independent Living." With a grant from the Federal Office of Education, the Cowell residents launched the "Physically Disabled Students' Program" (PDSP) in 1970. That organization, run by and for students with disabilities, aimed to provide such students with the services they would need to lead independent lives that were integrated into the broader community. Services included attendants to assist in dressing, personal hygiene, and other activities of daily living, as well as prompt and reliable wheelchair repair services-a necessity for wheelchair users who sought to live in the community. From the beginning, people with disabilities from both the Berkeley student body and the broader community sought to participate in the PDSP's services. The organizers of the program soon decided to create a new organization that was designed to serve the community at large. That organization, the Center for Independent Living (CIL), was incorporated in 1972. The founders of Berkeley's CIL sought to create an organization controlled by and serving people with diverse disabilities, which would provide "services that [people with disabilities could] control on their own terms, and [would be] dedicated to independence and the transcendence of other institutions."297 Moreover, instead of providing care and maintenance of people with disabilities those services would promote independence from medical and rehabilitation institutions. Above all, the Center dedicated itself to the principle of consumer control-the principle that people with disabilities should control the services they receive. At roughly the same time, independent living centers began to spring up throughout the country. In 1972, the same year that Berkeley's CIL was incorporated, disability activists in Houston started a cooperative living project that was dedicated to the same basic principles.29 Other disability activists founded the Boston Center for Independent Living in 1974.' Today, there are approximately 400 independent living centers throughout the United States. Although each center is different, as befits "a profoundly local movement, bred of the specific needs of individual communities as divergent as Berkeley and Columbus," °° most independent living organizations subscribe to several fundamental premises. "These premises include the notion that each individual is different and unique; that people with disabilities are the most knowledgeable experts about our own needs and issues; and that programs serving disabled people should be designed to serve all disability groups."s0 z As analyzed by Gerben DeJong, one of the movement's most important chroniclers, the independent living movement drew heavily on the civil rights, consumerism, self-help, demedicalization, and deinstitutionalization movements of the 1970s for several basic ideas: that discrimination is what prevents people with disabilities from achieving full integration into the community, that people with disabilities rather than medical and rehabilitation professionals should decide what services they receive and how they receive them, and that people with disabilities should have the opportunity to make their own decisions about their lives, bearing whatever risks those decisions entail. For a variety of reasons, the independent living movement became a major driving force behind the broader disability rights movement of the 1970s and 1980s. For one thing, "most of the early disability rights leaders were identified with CILs."03 The Berkeley Center for Independent Living, in particular, self-consciously positioned itself to groom disability rights leaders."0' The Berkeley CIL also organized the most significant protest of the early disability rights movement-a twenty-eight-day sit-in in the San Francisco office of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to protest Secretary Joe Califano's refusal to sign the regulations implementing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.30 5 Even after these early days, the independent living movement continued to play a major role in the disability rights movement by providing staging areas for disability activists in communities throughout the country, a network through which those activists could share information, and, perhaps most important, organizations with paid staff who could support disability rights activities. 3° Given the significant institutional role of the independent living movement in broader disability rights struggles, it should hardly be surprising that "the philosophy of independent living formed much of the basic philosophical underpinnings of the larger [Disability Rights Movement] .. 307
Law Key
Systemic and physical barriers degrade disabled people – reforming political structures is salient to broader disability movements
EPIC - 21[EPIC - Disability Employment Services (DES) specialists; July 22; Accessed 6/28/23 The biggest barrier for people with disability is how society disables them https://epicassist.org/the-biggest-barrier-for-people-with-disability/ -rrm]
The social model of disability states that there are six different types of barriers people with disability face. Barrier removal requires expertise, collaboration, advocacy and legal backing. Everyone can play a part in educating themselves about these barriers and learn how to create new pathways to ensure our society is as accessible and inclusive as possible. Attitudinal barriers Attitudinal barriers are created by individuals who can only see the impairment and not the person with a disability. At its worst believing in the stigma attached to disability can result in bullying, isolation and even violence. On the flip side of this, people can be incredibly patronising using people with disability as ‘inspirational porn.’ Although this belief has no malicious intent, people with disability do n

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