Rachel Maddow- please do a segment on HR620, a threat to the ADA

Dear Rachel,

First of all, I want to thank you for your allyship to the disability community. When ADAPT protesters took center stage in your show last summer over Medicaid cuts, many people with disabilities, myself included, felt that this was a huge game changer and turning point for disability advocacy. For the first time in my memory, MY community, people who look like ME, were seen front and center fighting for their basic human rights, and hailed as badass heroes as opposed to "people to be pitied."

I ask you to once again feature my community, as we face a major threat to the Americans with Disabilities Act. HR620, the "ADA Education and Reform Act", would be a step back for Civil Rights in this country. Its main premise: if someone has a complaint of an ADA violation, they must wait 6 months before they can pursue legal action, to give the business in question time to be "notified" of the ADA. Delays may be extended further if the business claims to be "making progress".

The ADA has been law for 27 years. It should be the responsibility of building and business owners and managers to familiarize themselves with laws that apply to them. What other marginalized group is forced to wait 6 months to enforce their civil rights? Additionally, there is already an "undue burden clause" where if making a business ADA compliant would cause significant burden, it doesn't have to be done. If businesses are afraid of lawsuits, they should make themselves ADA compliant, not lobby Congress for a bill that would strip an estimated 56.7 million Americans (https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/miscellaneous/cb12-134.html) of their civil rights.

I am privileged to be of the "ADA generation". This federal law is only 6 months older than I am. I have faced numerous accessibility issues in my life, but have always known that accessibility is my RIGHT. Older people with my same disability have told me of the "dark days", where they were unable to go to school, to work, to malls, to restaurants. I hate to think that we could be heading back in that direction.

Additionally, in my experience, accessibility is ALREADY the burden of people with disabilties, not businesses. One of my greatest accessibility needs as someone with a mobility disability and chronic pain is that doors be ADA compliant. With the exception of fire doors, public doors are supposed to require no more than 5 pounds of force to open, or have an automatic button door opener. HARDLY ANYWHERE follows this law. I just graduated with my master's from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, CO, and was unable to access the majority of classrooms and bathrooms on campus due to noncompliant doors. The campus was constructed in 2007, well after the ADA passed, but is still not ADA compliant. The disability services office addressed a few doors I used regularly, but the campus-wide issue has not been addressed. This is how slowly accessibility improvements happen even WITH the threat of a lawsuit, and just one of many accessibility issues that Americans face daily. What would the incentive be to make changes if an immediate lawsuit weren't a possibility? 

In the era of Trump, millions of Americans look to you to keep us up to date on the threats against our democracy. I ask that you feature HR620 and the disability community to help bring this issue into the limelight, and bring more people into the fight to make sure that this bill does not become law.

Sincerely,

Sarah Hunt

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