HR 620 prohibits anyone from suing a business or other public accommodation unless the person so aggrieved has notified the entity that said entity is not complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
That's right:Nineteen Fucking Ninety!
Because twenty-seven years just isn't enough time for people to figure out what the fuck they are supposed to do to comply with the ADA and then do it.
Some horrible excuse for a sentient being named "Ted Poe" introduced the bill. Not surprisingly, he's from Texas. You know, the state that was just hit by a hurricane that brought epic flooding, a state where the congressional delegation almost unanimously said "fuck you" to other states that had similar catastrophes.
This shameful piece of legislative trash has 40 Republican and 11 Democrats co-sponsoring it. Every one of them is obviously lacking in some element of humanity.
Every one of them should be confined to a wheelchair for a year and required to, without any aides or other assistants, tour a goodly sample of cities and towns in their districts, including visiting town halls and courthouses. And they should have to make at least half of the trips by public transportation.
This miserable excuse for legislating means that 27 years after the ADA was passed, businesses and governments will have zero incentive to actually comply with the act unless somebody gives them written notice.
I'm surprised that Ted Poe, a political whore if there ever was one, hasn't introduced similar bills to gut the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
There should be a law that requires his face to be painted into toilet bowls and urinals in all public bathrooms in the the Capitol and in every VA and military hospital.
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6 comments:
Just FYI:
ADA is updated every so often. And it is "Reinterpereted" oftener.
Plus even doing maintainence can change things and result in non-compliance.
What was in compliance in 1995 or 2010 may not be today, and the business owner may well not know it cause he doesn't check every month for changes.
So yeah, having to have notice and a chance to fix something before you get sued might be nice fucking idea since the rules of the fucking game change often.
Comrade, will you stop impuning whores, please. Most do the best to deliver good value for money...and while Congresscritters aspire to that reputation, they usually fall woefully short.
B is reasonable...except that making ADA toothless makes it...gutless. What's needed is a means of keeping the ADA requirements clear and readily available....and enforced...you know like police give tickets when you run a red light, like when it happens? That's the law that should be proposed. As it is, the proposed law would only legalize what is the current situation: some poor disabled SOB has to complain and go to the police and the courts and....
I understand that this can drop like a thunderbolt on some clueless business man, but ignorance of the law and all that. Plus said clueless lives a life of ability, but let me tell you, the disabled live a life pilloried by disability, every effing clued-in second.
I was born in '47, my mother was almost totally paralyzed in '48, the family reassembled after her time in (FDR's) Warm Springs maybe in '50 and I grew up taking care of her. Everything rotated around the home: we didn't go out much (no ADA, no movies) and the highlight of air travel, before Jetways, was carrying my mother up the stairs into the airplane. I could go on and on....but you get the idea.
Two more things:
One: my mother was the most courageous person I ever met; I never ever heard her complain even though ever day must have been a conscious choice and effort. That is courage, not the testosteronic stupidity of Schwarzenegger and Norris.
Two: WWII was won and the Depression beat by a man in a wheelchair. When you start bitching about the cost of ADA and the problems of compliance, remember how else those two cataclysmic events might have turned out had we not had FDR, had he not hidden his paralysis and had the wealth to live something like a normal life in spite of no ADA.
So I don't cry for the hapless, clueless business man. He has no idea of what soul-crushing effort the disabled go through daily, has no idea of what others can bring to the vitality of the nation through their enablement. But that's conservative Libertarianism: you've got yours and that's the only thing that counts.
Gosh, I was just so busy, I didn't have the time, I was too busy, I wasn't paying attention, I was too busy, I didn't have time... to learn what may cost me my business.
You ever scrape someone up off the pavement, boy, after they'd just fallen thirty feet from the third tier of a scaffolding system? "I didn't know there was supposed to be a rail" doesn't cut it.
Here in "America" we have a saying: ignorance is no excuse.
OK, here's a bit of back story: Soon after the ADA was passed, I was on the management team of a factory. A few hundred people worked there. There had been an article about what businesses had to do that was in the local bird-cage liner.
So at a staff meeting, I raised the issue of ADA compliance. The VP of Operations told me "don't worry about it. We'll wait until somebody complains or sues us." His point was that the company wasn't going to spend a nickel on complying with the law unless they had to.
That was the prevailing attitude. All those curb-cuts that you see in cities and towns for wheelchair users, the ones that have little raised nubbins so blind people know that the street is there? Those exist because somebody sued. From businesses and town governments to state agencies, it's taken litigation to get them to comply. It took a class-action suit to force one of the largest state agencies in the nation, Caltrans, to comply with the ADA with regard to shit like curb cuts. That case was filed in 2006 and settled in 2009.
Think about that fr a second. Sixteen years after the ADA was passed, Caltrans couldn't be bothered to bring sidewalks and curbs into compliance when they did work on them. The issue wasn't that Caltrans didn't go out and rebuild all of those things, it was when Caltrans did rebuild them, they weren't making hem ADA-compliant.
So no, B, it's not a matter of business owners and local governments being too busy or too confused to figure out how to comply with the ADA, or to keep up with changes. It's about them deliberately choosing not to comply until they are forced to.
That's why HR 620 is evil. And so is Ted Poe and his co-sponsors. They are all heartless and soulless weasels.
And my apologies to weasels for equating them with politicians like Ted Poe. Weasels, at least, occupy a niche in the ecosystem. Poe, not so much.
See, and you are wrong. Sometimes it is about not knowing. I've run a business. It IS difficult to keep up on all the changes in the ADA stuff. Stuff that was compliant in 200 might not be in 2001. And there is no way to keep up on all the changes in regulations that you aren't notified about.
Somehow there has to be a way to make people fix things that they don't know about until notified, yet prevent the abuses you point out and have experienced. Not every business person is evil. Some are, some aren't. Just because you've met a few bad apples doesn't mean every businessperson is.
As I read this bill, once notified and given a chance to cure the failing, then the business can still be sued if they don't cure it.
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