What a Sad Sight — a Stream of Political Cowards Passed Wheelchair-Bound Senator Bob Dole — on their Way to Vote Down Passage of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that He and War-Scarred Senator John McCain Had Supported

10 December 2012

A painful contrast, when compared with President Bush’s 1990 signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act

Last week, 38 Republican Senators prevented ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Depressingly, their grounds for rejecting the Convention ranged from disingenuous through deceitful to delusionally stupid. I say this as an attorney accustomed to litigation, as well as statutory and treaty interpretation.

Had these Republican Senators paid any attention to reasonable legal advice, they would have recognized that they were posturing to ignoramuses among the electorate, at the expense of disabled people everywhere.

Background to what happened

The international Convention is directly based on the United States’ Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 — which decades ago passed the Senate by 76-8 and the House by 403-20.

What is also striking about the 38 Senators’ nay vote last week is that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had supported the Convention, in the form a letter from Chamber president Thomas Donohue to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

And military veterans like battle-scarred Republican Senators John McCain (Vietnam) and Bob Dole (World War II) were determined in their efforts to get the Convention ratified. Bob Dole, at a very frail 89, showed up on the Senate floor to appeal to his colleagues’ sense of humanity.

Why I bother to comment — the sad decline in America’s desire to be a “Can Do” People

Two symbolically meaningful pictures caught my eye this week.

These two scenes synopsize our decline from “Can Do” America into “Obstructionist” America:

United States White House, George H.W. Bush at the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act on the South Lawn, 1990, C-Span (26 July 1990) (video clip showing President Bush enthusiastically praising overwhelming bipartisan passage of the Act)

C-Span2 and Associated Press, Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole wheeled into the Senate Chamber in Washington D.C., on Dec. 4,2012, by his wife Elizabeth Dole, via Charles Kenny, How the Senate Failed U.S. Businesses (and Bob Dole), Bloomberg BusinessWeek (06 December 2012) (still photograph)

What these pictures show — a pronounced change in America’s mood, leadership, and capabilities — in just two decades

Two pictures, poles apart:

First, watch President George H. W. Bush speak about the worth of the Americans with Disabilities Act just after he signed it into law. Notice his optimism and his pride in the bipartisan support that the Act had received in Congress.

Then, look at the sad picture of Senator Bob Dole, as he observes 38 Republicans demolish any hope that America’s example in signing the ADA into law (in 1990) will be paralleled by Senate ratification of the international Convention that is directly based on it in 2012.

In 1990 President Bush led an optimistic, “Can Do” nation.

Today, we can’t even accomplish sensible and necessary things — due to senseless (meaning irrational) obstructionism, predominantly coming from the far political Right.

The 38 Senators’ reasons for voting “nay” — as capably summarized by one of them, Senator Mike Lee

The Senators’ objections to the Convention fell into three related baskets — diminished sovereignty and two subsets of that, home schooling and abortion.

Utah’s Senator Mike Lee did an excellent job of summarizing his objections to the Convention. His reasoning is synonymous with the objections that similarly voting Senators have expressed in public.

Regarding sovereignty and precedent, Senator Lee wrote:

In this case, parties to this convention are subjected to the direction of an independent committee charged with the duties of making regulations and enforcing them.

In the past similar independent committees have been known to make demands of state parties that fall outside the legal, social, economic and cultural traditions and norms of state parties.

By obligating the U.S. to recognize economic, social, and cultural entitlements as rights, this convention sets a precedent for treaties that would actually allow an international body to define our own domestic law.

In regard to home schooling:

Several parental rights groups (including the Home School Legal Defense Fund) have shared this concern and fear this treaty could strip parents of fundamental rights.

For example, a right that could be stripped could be the ability to home school a child with disabilities if the Committee (or those carrying out its recommendations) believes it is in the best interests of their child.

And on abortion:

There is specific language in the convention that requires parties to “provide persons with disabilities with the same range, quality and standard of free or affordable health care and programs as provided to other persons, including in the area of sexual and reproductive health and population-based public health programs.”

The Obama administration has declared that abortion itself falls under “sexual and reproductive health” and therefore would fall under the requirements of this language.

These objections might make sense, if they had anything to do with the actual wording of the Convention — or with Real World judicial application of international law

But they don’t — at least from an experienced litigator’s perspective.

What the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities actually says

Law cannot be paraphrased, without altering its meaning. If people are too lazy to read to read the Convention, they have no business rendering opinions on the virtues of ratifying or rejecting it.

Following are the most pertinent portions of the international agreement.

Ask yourself whether the 38 Republican Senators were making sense, when they claimed that the Convention violates American sovereignty, prohibits home schooling, encourages abortion, and variously imposes other forms of harmful international nonsense on Americans:

Article 4 — General Obligations

Article 9 - Accessibility

Article 12 - Equal recognition before the law

Article 13 - Access to justice

Article 16 - Freedom from exploitation, violence and abuse

Article 25 - Health

Article 28 - Adequate standard of living and social protection

Article 33 - National implementation and monitoring

If you read these pertinent articles — and every other one of the Convention’s total of 50 — you will see that all of Senator Lee’s objections are unwarranted.

Let’s start with sovereignty.

Sovereignty — and common sense, the missing ingredient that accounts for much of the Right’s paranoid frothing

What repeatedly strikes me about my friends on the Pronounced Right is their unwillingness to look at the world through perspectives provided common sense and experience.

In the case of the Convention, there is no mechanism to override American sovereignty and international law itself possesses no weapons with which to make the United States do anything.

Let me illustrate this with a parallel that seems, superficially, to run the other way — the World Trade Organization. When other nations protest American trade policies (under facts covered by the actual wording of the agreement), the WTO can and does occasionally call the United States onto the carpet. See, for example, a diagram of the WTO's "panel process."

One would think that the WTO example provides Senator Lee and his obstructing colleagues with good reason to fear similar interference from the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

But such a supposedly worrisome comparison misses the point on three critical grounds:

Wording

The disability Convention is not structured like the WTO agreements. And the Convention lacks similar enforcement mechanisms.

Motivation

Unlike trade, in which American actions do impact other nations in the pocketbook, American practices in regard to the rights of the disabled do not.

Other nations and international law have no motivation to try to regulate American disability policies.

Voluntariness — “We let ‘em do it”

The WTO gets to meddle in American trade policy because we let it.

Both American political parties think that WTO policies benefit American business more than they negatively impinge American sovereignty.

The plutocratic interests that the Republican Party so visible supports are exactly the ones that most vehemently support U.S. participation in the WTO.

If the United States really objected to something the WTO decided, we simply wouldn’t do (or not do) it.

In sum, American experience under the World Trade Organization contradicts Senator Lee’s concerns about reduced American sovereignty, as affected by the international disabilities Convention.

Home schooling — not even mentioned in the Convention

It is far too long a legal stretch to think that the Convention’s wording about benefiting disabled children could be interpreted to in the way that Senator Lee and colleagues assume. Doing so would mean that the international community could force the United States to force individual American state governments to remove kids from their parents’ educational control.

We have already seen that the Convention fails to override U.S. sovereignty. How is it going to end run our national sovereignty in order to crush State’s Rights?

Abortion — not mentioned, and the pertinent Convention provision works predominantly to protect, rather than crush

Again, assuming that U.S. sovereignty could be overcome, how is the Convention’s provision to provide the disabled with equal rights to medical care the same as saying “we” are going to encourage disabled people to abort fetuses?

Here is the applicable wording from Article 25:

a) Provide persons with disabilities with the same range, quality and standard of free or affordable health care and programmes as provided to other persons,

including in the area of sexual and reproductive health and population-based public health programmes;

b) Provide those health services needed by persons with disabilities specifically because of their disabilities, including early identification and intervention as appropriate, and services designed to minimize and prevent further disabilities, including among children and older persons . . . .

Senator Lee’s argument is essentially that we should keep disabled people subordinate, so that we can deprive them of the reproductive rights that everyone else has.

Senator Lee’s opposition to the Convention, on the basis of the above wording (which he quotes), forces him into the intellectual corner of implying that:

(a) U.S. disabled people have less of a right to reproductive services and abortion than everybody else

(b) disabled people are more likely than others to abort their babies.

This anti-abortion, anti-Convention argument is the stupidest and most bigoted of the three that have been made against the agreement.

The moral? — Two symbolic pictures, seen in context, expose the decline of Can Do America

There is a difference between principled integrity and the cowardly feigning of principle. And another between the reason and articulated air-headedness. And still another between intelligent caution and obstructionism.

Influential national Republican Party leaders find themselves too often on the intellectually and spiritually unflattering ends of these spectrums.

Obstructionism grants no grace, when dealing with most aspects of the human condition. “Can Do” is a far more American a sentiment than “Won’t.”

PeteFree.com

What a Sad Sight — a Stream of Political Cowards Passed Wheelchair-Bound Senator Bob Dole — on their Way to Vote Down Passage of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that He and War-Scarred Senator John McCain Had Supported