It appears that Republicans are at it again. For most of the current century, an effort has been underway to pass federal legislation weakening the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA). The strategy aims to amend the act so that an individual cannot take legal action against a business or place of public accommodation under the ADA until that entity is first provided notice explaining what the alleged violation is, as well as allowing it a certain period of time to address the problem.
Back in 2000, for example, Republican lawmakers introduced a bill called the ADA Notification Act. This bill sought to amend Title III of the ADA to require, as a precondition to commencing a civil action against a place of public accommodation or a commercial facility, that an opportunity be provided to correct the alleged violations.
The bill stated that before any legal action could commence, the potential plaintiff would have to provide the potential defendant with a notice of the alleged violation, either in person or by registered mail. That notice had to identify the specifics about the violation, including the location and date of its occurrence. It also had to inform the potential defendant that they had ninety days to correct the issue.
Then there was the ADA Notification Act of 2005, which said pretty much the same thing. Again, its co-sponsors were all Republicans.
Several other attempts have been made to accomplish this goal. The ADA Education and Reform Act of 2017 passed the U.S. House of Representatives in February 2018. Had it been adopted into law, a plaintiff would have been required to provide written notice detailing the specific ADA violation. The business owner would then have sixty days to provide a written plan outlining how they would fix the issue, followed by an additional sixty days to remove the barrier or make substantial progress toward doing so.
When the bill moved to the U.S. Senate, however, Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois, who uses a wheelchair because of injuries sustained during military combat, rounded up forty-two other Senators who vowed to oppose it if it ever came up for a vote.
Those forty-three Senators sent a letter to Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, the majority leader at that time, urging him to make it clear that the legislation would “never receive a vote in the United States Senate during the 115th Congress.” That was enough to kill it.
On March 26, 2026, U.S. Representative Mike Lawler, Republican of New York, issued a statement gleefully announcing that a bill he recently sponsored, called the ADA 30 Days to Comply Act, had moved out of the House Judiciary Committee with a “bipartisan” vote of 16 to 8. This bill requires potential plaintiffs to first supply potential defendants with a notice “specific enough to allow such owner or operator to identify the barrier” and then allow them thirty days to respond.
Lawler is a swing district Republican who is serving a second term in the House and running for re-election. He likes to describe himself and his approach to governing as “bipartisan,” so it’s funny that he has chosen to push this longtime Republican myth about the premise of ADA notification legislation as a way of showing just how bipartisan he can be.
Efforts like this to water down the ADA have even spread to the state level. In March, the Missouri Senate unanimously passed legislation that would give businesses ninety days to respond to lawsuits alleging website accessibility violations under the ADA, or fix their websites. The Missouri House had previously passed a similar bill without opposition. Both state legislative chambers must now agree on a final version to send to the governor for review.
The bill is a result of pressure from more than 100 business owners who had received ADA lawsuits over their websites.
Those who advocate the most for these drastic changes to the ADA often cite highly publicized cases in which lawyers filed ADA lawsuits against private businesses and were accused of using that litigation to extract money from the targeted businesses. When the ADA Notification Act of 2000 was being discussed in the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Representative Mark Foley, Republican of Florida, and one of its co-sponsors, alleged that some attorneys use the ADA to get money out of businesses.
This argument assumes that businesses that don’t comply with the ADA are always victims that would gladly comply if only they knew what to do. But filing a bunch of ADA complaints is not the fastest route for a lawyer if they are simply seeking to get rich. And let’s not forget that the ADA became law in 1990, so we’ve all had almost four decades to learn what it’s about. How much more notice is enough?
When Foley testified before the House subcommittee, he acknowledged that “ignorance of the law is no defense.” And the letter to McConnell says, “No American should be forced to endure discrimination for any length of time so that places of public accommodation may learn how to follow a seminal, bipartisan civil rights law that was enacted in 1990.”
It adds that “proponents of the [ADA Education and Reform Act] assert that eliminating the right of Americans to seek immediate injunctive relief under Title III of the ADA is necessary to address private lawsuits that threaten businesses with punitive damages and demand monetary settlements. However, these private actions seeking damages are filed pursuant to specific State laws that unlike Title III of the ADA, authorize monetary damages.”
It continues: “However, it would destroy any incentive under the ADA for timely removal of architectural barriers in public accommodations. Because Title III of the ADA does not provide for damages, a business would have no reason to comply with the law unless and until it received written notice from a person with a disability who had been harmed, informing the business that it had violated the law, and the business would then have four months to remove the barrier or make ‘substantial progress’ in doing so. There would be no consequence for breaking the law until the notice was received and the waiting period expired.”
The leaders of this relentless quest to weaken the ADA often proclaim how much they really love it, and that they are only trying to make it more effective. Foley noted that the ADA is “one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation we have passed in recent years.” He continued: “At the time it was signed into law, however, even President [H.W.] Bush acknowledged concerns about unintended consequences. And today, we are facing one of those unintended consequences. To put it simply, the ADA is being used by some attorneys to shake down thousands of businesses from Florida to California.”
Lawler recently said, “Ensuring accessibility for individuals with disabilities should always be the priority, not prolonged and costly litigation. The ADA 30 Days to Comply Act takes a commonsense, bipartisan approach by empowering individuals to raise concerns while giving businesses a clear opportunity to address issues promptly. I am proud to see this legislation advance and look forward to working with my bipartisan colleagues to get this signed into law.”
But if that happens, Duckworth cautions, it would isolate “Americans living with disabilities as the only federally protected class of citizens forced to rely on ‘education,’ rather than strong enforcement, to exercise their basic civil rights.”