July 27, 2010

Would the ADA Pass Today?

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A few days ago I expressed some doubts that the Truth in Lending Act, which passed easily in 1968, could pass today. Sure, it was the right thing to do, but it also imposed a bunch of regulations on businesses that cost them money. Today, that cost would probably be viewed as far more important than the benefits to consumers, and a bill like TLA would either be watered down into mush or never seriously taken up in the first place. We just don’t believe in regulating businesses any longer solely because we think we have the right to tell them how consumers ought to be treated. Even lots of liberals — including me, some of the time — have succumbed to this attitude.

Paul Tomasky, on the 20th anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, listens to Rand Paul fulminating against the ADA because it’s not “fair to the business owner” and wonders if the ADA could pass either:

Paul is more extreme than your average Republican, but it does make one wonder whether today’s Republican Party would have supported the ADA. In 1990, it passed the Senate 76-8 and passed the House by unanimous voice vote. I think we can say with great confidence that those particular outcomes would never have happened today, and we’d have seen far more caterwauling about the impositions placed on business and so on.

I will grant that the ADA has cost businesses some money, and that there surely have been some nuisance lawsuits. But it’s made the US a better place. In 1990, the GOP saw this. Today’s GOP would never accept such regulatory “impositions” on the private sector. You might get eight or 10 of them to vote for such a bill, because they would make the decision as a party that overall they didn’t want to be seen as picking on people in wheelchairs, but the distance from only a handful of Republicans opposing that bill to Rand Paul’s comments in May is one marker of how extreme the GOP has become.

Has this change in priorities over the past few decades made America a better place? For some, yes. For most, no. Jon Cohn has more.

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