John Hirschauer writes at National Review Online about Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ plan for Americans with disabilities.
Whatever the intentions of its drafters, Bernie Sanders’s new “Disability Rights” platform would deprive thousands of people with the most severe disabilities of both their freedom of choice and their ability to access intensive support services. Sanders’s platform, concocted in tandem with a coterie of disability activists and self-advocates, details the candidate’s plans to pass the “Disability Integration Act” and to instruct the Department of Justice to “aggressively” enforce the Supreme Court’s Olmstead decision.
These policies will, if enacted, affect some of the most vulnerable members of our society, who cannot voice their objections to the dogmatic pronouncements of those claiming to speak on their behalf.
The Disability Integration Act, for instance, threatens the home of Stacie Choslovsky, a resident at the Misericordia campus in Chicago. Her brother, Bill, is Stacie’s guardian, and an Illinois attorney who has argued and consulted on numerous disability-related cases. …
… Despite its drafters’ claim to the contrary, the DIA betrays the Court’s holding in Olmstead. This case weighed the legality of institutional placements under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Court’s majority held that states were obligated to provide placement in the “most integrated setting appropriate to the needs of qualified individuals with disabilities (emphasis mine),” deferring that judgment to the state’s medical professionals, and — critically — rejecting the suggestion that there was a “federal requirement that community-based treatment be imposed on patients who do not desire it.”
