Ted Eytan/Creative Commons
I feel especially righteous when I get arrested, which I’ve been a time or two. If you’re going to get arrested for protesting, there’s nothing like having the White House as a backdrop. It’s a great photo op. There’s also something wonderfully intrusive about it. I feel like I’m getting in the big man’s face.
But at the same time, it can seem rather pointless. First of all, there’s all the competition. There’s always somebody else protesting outside the White House and everybody’s looking for the right gimmick to snare the attention-getting edge. Once, during a protest there, I saw a dozen or so people marching around dressed like obscure Star Wars characters. I don’t know much about Star Wars, but that’s what they looked like to me. They also all appeared to be blindfolded. I have no idea what their message was supposed to be.
Then there’s the peace vigil in Lafayette Square across from the White House that’s been there since 1981. Somebody sits out there every minute of every day in the bitter cold and blazing heat. I have to admire their dedication and perseverance, but then I ask myself what good it all does. Do we have world peace? No. Was whatever grievance the blindfolded Star Wars characters were airing satisfactorily addressed? My guess is probably not.
Maybe I should lighten up. Appreciate and honor the pure act of exercising my freedom of speech. But I can’t. I’m too much of a sore loser. If I’m going to play, I want to win. And I don’t mean moral victories. I want the change I’m protesting for to actually occur. And I want it to occur right now! Otherwise, I feel like a chump. I feel like I’ve seized the opportunity to stand up and be ignored.
Sometimes, outside the White House has felt like a dead zone to me. Protests are so common that if the people inside think about us at all, I imagine, it’s to glibly dismiss us as crackpots as they go about their dirty business. I may think I’m getting in the big man’s face, but the big man’s probably not even home.
Then again, you never know. Even if protesting outside the White House feels like a crushing waste of time, you might as well give it a shot. Something beautiful might occur.
Joe Shapiro is an incredible journalist who works for National Public Radio. He’s the author of the book No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement.
In September 2006, one of his pieces aired on the radio show Morning Edition. Shapiro recounted a protest in the spring of 2002, when 200 people, many of them in wheelchairs, blocked the intersection closest to the White House and snarled traffic. Shapiro reported that the protesters stayed in the street for three hours before police moved in to make arrests.
That protest was organized by the direct action disability rights group ADAPT. I was part of that protest, though I don’t remember much about it. I’ve taken part in so many ADAPT protests outside the White House that it’s all a big blur. On this particular day, I was probably lamenting the futility of it all and wishing the police would hurry up and arrest us.
In Shapiro’s report, Mark McClellan, then a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, said he was working inside the White House that day. The White House chief of staff called him to say, “Mark, there are some people outside who are blocking traffic at the intersection of Seventeenth and Pennsylvania. It’s coming up on rush hour. Go fix it.”
And so McClellan came out and met with us protesters. Protest leader Bob Kafka told him how rigged Medicaid rules force disabled people into nursing homes if they need Medicaid to cover the cost of daily assistance. Instead of a disabled person following Medicaid money into a nursing home, the money ought to follow the person, Kafka argued. If someone would rather live in his or her own home with the help of paid assistants, Medicaid ought to cover that, too.
As a result of that encounter, Shapiro reported, the administration of George W. Bush in 2005 proposed giving states money to help disabled folks move out of nursing homes and into homes of their own. The initiative was called Money Follows the Person. Congress later that year allocated $2 billion to pay for MFP for five years.
As a result of that encounter, Shapiro reported, the administration of George W. Bush in 2005 proposed giving states money to help disabled folks move out of nursing homes and into homes of their own. The initiative was called Money Follows the Person.
The legislation that created and funded MFP also required the Department of Health and Human Services to evaluate the program’s effectiveness and submit a report to the President and Congress.
That report came out in June 2017. It’s remarkable. I never thought reading a government report would get me all jazzed up, but it did.
The report says that forty-two states and the District of Columbia used MFP funds to move 63,337 Medicaid-eligible people out of institutions between 2007 (when MFP money became available) and 2015. These moves saved money: participating states saved $978 million during the first year after implementing MFP.
More importantly, the report says: “The changes in the quality of life that occur when participants move to the community are remarkable and important indicators that this [initiative] has had positive impacts on participants’ lives . . . and any dollar value placed on these improvements would not adequately reflect what it means for people with significant disabilities when they can live in and contribute to their local communities.”
In November, fifty-seven-year-old Jimmie Yarbrough, of Chicago, celebrated the sixth anniversary of the day he moved out of the nursing home where he had lived for four years. It was a place in which he was never comfortable or content, but he was resigned to being there because his disabilities had progressed to where he was using a wheelchair and needed assistance.
Through the residents’ grapevine, he heard that Access Living, a service and advocacy agency run by people with disabilities, had a project to help people like him get out of nursing homes, funded in part by an MFP grant.
Jimmie jumped at the chance—figuratively. Seven months later, he was settled into the one-bedroom apartment he still lives in today, in the neighborhood where he grew up. Access Living even helped him purchase furniture and appliances, which he otherwise could not afford. Jimmie says getting out of the nursing home has given him “peace of mind, a new direction.”
But sadly, Congress failed to reauthorize MFP in 2016, so the money stopped flowing. A Senate bill called the EMPOWER Care Act (S-2227), which would fund MFP through 2022, was introduced last December by Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, and Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington. An identical House bill (HR 5306) was introduced in March by Brett Guthrie, Republican of Kentucky, and Debbie Dingell, Democrat of Michigan. That bill passed through the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee and is now on the House floor, but it was amended to fund the program only for one year. The Senate bill remains in committee.
The stakes are high. Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, an organization representing leaders of state Medicaid agencies, testified at the House subcommittee hearing. He said MFP “has provided states with significant financial resources to develop the infrastructure necessary to support individuals’ transitions from institutions back into the community.” But because funds are drying up, many states are shutting their MFP programs down, with nothing to replace them. Therefore, he said, “Medicaid Directors strongly support a prompt reauthorization of MFP.”
But because funds are drying up, many states are shutting their MFP programs down, with nothing to replace them. Therefore, he said, “Medicaid Directors strongly support a prompt reauthorization of MFP.”
Getting that to happen may be difficult. It may even necessitate a few protests.
But the squatter currently occupying the White House seems bent on cracking down on pesky protesters gathering on his D.C. doorstep. (He has so many doorsteps.) In August, the National Park Service proposed new rules that subtly serve that purpose, like charging fees to hold political rallies on certain public grounds in D.C., to cover the cost of damage to grass and such.
In an October 8 response to this proposal, Arthur B. Spitzer, legal co-director of the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia, wrote, “If a ‘cost recovery’ requirement for demonstrations had been in effect in 1963, the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, with its ‘I have a dream’ speech by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., probably couldn’t have happened. The National Park Service cannot seek to balance its budget on the backs of people seeking to exercise their constitutional rights.”
The proposed rules would also close off all but five feet of the sidewalk outside the White House fence to pedestrians. Spitzer wrote, “The area to be closed is the area known as the White House sidewalk, which has long been recognized as perhaps the most iconic public forum in the nation, one that has enabled We the People to express our views directly to the nation’s Chief Executive, going back at least to the Women’s Suffrage movement 100 years ago.”
Wait! What? We’ll have to compete with blindfolded Star Wars characters and peace vigil-ers and everybody else for five feet of sidewalk space? Riots will break out for sure! But at least, I guess, that will make it easy to get arrested.