We’re entering the Biden-Harris years, which—considering how punch drunk we all are from the last four years—are destined to someday be known as the Golden Age of Basic Human Decency.
Things got so bad that the ascension of a candidate with basic moral tenets makes a body buoyant with hope for a better future.
Biden dismisses defunding the police as a dangerous anarchist slogan, rather than challenging Americans to grasp what it really means.
However, for the sake of protecting my fragile heart, I’m trying hard to keep in touch with reality and not let my euphoria over the eviction of the squatter who used to occupy the White House inflate my expectations of what’s to come. Democrats are not automatic political allies of disabled folks.
On November 7, after being declared the winner by everyone except the squatter and his followers, Biden announced, “We must make the promise of the country real for everybody—no matter their race, their ethnicity, their faith, their identity, or their disability.”
That’s good because, when Democrats recite the list of neglected people whom they assure will no longer be neglected, they often forget to include disabled folks. Biden put us last but, oh well, we made the list.
But a few months earlier, when the great coalescence occurred and Harris and other Democrat presidential candidates dropped their campaigns and took up with Biden, I saw it as a dreadful occurrence. At the time, Biden was the only major Democratic candidate who hadn’t put out a disability plan. That said a lot about the importance the Biden campaign gave to disability issues and courting our votes. Activists came up with the hashtag #AccesstoJoe on Twitter to amplify Biden’s failure and spur action.
Biden finally released a disability plan on May 28. It was called “The Biden Plan for Full Participation and Equality for People With Disabilities.” The Hill called the plan “wide-ranging” and many disability activists were pleased with the final product.
Does that make me feel better? Well, yes and no. It’s still disturbing that disability rights was an afterthought for the Biden campaign. Again, we were last on the list. But at least he did take some action. And it was far more than just issuing some lame “I love the Americans with Disabilities Act” proclamation on the anniversary of the signing of that law.
The annual celebration of the ADA signing every July 26 is just like Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, in the sense that every snake politician that spends the rest of the year upholding white supremacy crawls out from under their slimy rock on MLK Day to declare their eternal love for him and his agenda. Likewise, the same forces that do their best to undermine the ADA jump at the chance to score cheap points on the anniversary of its signing by singing its praises.
But anyway, based on the promises in Biden’s plan, how much do I expect him to deliver for disabled folks?
First off, I have to say I’m disturbed by his adamant rejection of the idea of defunding the police. This isn’t specifically a disability issue, but it does have a major impact on us.
There are countless stories of people with disabilities, especially psychiatric and cognitive disabilities, being killed in encounters with law enforcement.
According to The Washington Post, between 2014 and 2020, police fatally shot 1,324 people, many of whom the police admit were experiencing a mental health crisis at the time. These instances make up about 25 percent of all fatal police shootings during that period.
In 2019, Stacy Kenny was killed by police after being pulled over while driving in Springfield, Oregon. According to the lawsuit filed by her family, Kenny had a diagnosis of schizophrenia. During the traffic stop, the suit says, Kenny—who was terrified and unarmed—didn’t comply with being told to get out of her car. That’s when four officers decided to shatter the car’s driver and passenger-side windows, as they tried to drag Kenny out, beating and tasing her.
After one of the officers got into the car and Kenny started driving off, he shot her five times and killed her. Kenny’s family was paid $4.55 million from the city of Springfield last year as a settlement for the lawsuit.
This is a classic example of what defunding the police is all about. It’s about not always sending police—who are trained to restore “order” by asserting their dominance—to respond to every conflict. Police are not mental health counselors, nor should that be expected of them. In situations like these, patient deescalation is what’s often required, not brute force.
But Biden dismisses defunding the police as a dangerous anarchist slogan, rather than challenging Americans to grasp what it really means. That makes it much more likely that people like Stacy Kenny will continue to pay with their lives.
In his disability plan, Biden calls for ending the practice of paying disabled workers far less than the minimum wage. That’s good, because this is an abomination. Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 allows bosses to petition the U.S. Department of Labor to pay a disabled worker less than minimum wage if the employer can prove that the employee is less productive than a nondisabled worker doing the same job. There’s no limit to how low wages can go (except for, maybe, zero), so there have been many stories of disabled workers making pennies per hour.
Some states have abolished subminimum wages for disabled workers, and Biden says he wants to phase out 14(c). That would be great, but there have been several failed legislative attempts over many years to eliminate the deeply flawed provision. They have all been beaten back by entities that regularly pay subminimum wages, such as Goodwill Industries.
If Biden intends to finally succeed in eliminating subminimum wages, he’ll have to be adamant and aggressive.
The most important thing Biden can do for disabled folks is to support policy priorities that keep us out of nursing homes and other oppressive institutions. Take, for example, me.
I need help every day doing all the routine things everyone does, like getting dressed and taking a shower. But I live in a condo with my wife and dog because I receive help doing all of these things from a crew of people I’ve hired to assist me. I could never afford to pay for all this assistance out of my own pocket. But, fortunately, I don’t have to, because the wages of my workers are paid by public funds like Medicaid.
Without this program, Medicaid would probably be paying much more to warehouse me in some stinking nursing home somewhere, with no possibility of parole. I wouldn’t be able to get up, go to bed, or eat what I want, when I want. I couldn’t drink beer. I couldn’t come and go and receive guests as I please. I’d be flat broke. I sure as hell wouldn’t have a condo, a wife, or a dog.
But I’m lucky. A lot of disabled folks who need the support of programs like these don’t have access to them because they aren’t adequately funded. Federal long-term care funding policy is rigged in favor of the nursing home industry and other forces that profit off of the captivity of disabled folks. Who would willingly check themselves permanently into a nursing home if they had access to programs like the one that serves me?
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted in bright, fluorescent colors the deadliness of this state of captivity. The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic points out that, even though less than 1 percent of the U.S. population resides in long-term care facilities, 38 percent of national deaths from the coronavirus have occurred in these facilities. That’s over a million COVID-19 cases and 126,773 deaths in 29,375 facilities, as of the end of 2020.
Is anyone surprised by this? Nursing home residents have no control over who enters their living space, so the odds are exponentially greater that, sooner or later, someone will bring in something nasty.
Biden has proposed to do something about this, but not in his disability plan. It appears, instead, in his economic platform, where he says he wants to spend $450 billion over ten years on programs that empower disabled people to choose to receive care in community-based settings. Biden has pledged to provide states with enough money to allow the 800,000 people currently on waiting lists for these services to receive them.
The President has said he shoehorned this into his economic plan because investing in caregiving will create jobs and free up unpaid family caregivers to find work. But again, this is an injustice that has existed for decades, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Waiting lists of 800,000 don’t just pop up overnight.
If Biden is to deliver on these or any of the big promises he’s made to disabled folks, he’ll have to do a whole lot more than just make proposals. Does he have it in him? I don’t know. We’ll see.