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Linda Hamilton Krieger Introduction For civil rights lawyers who had toiled through the 1980s in the increasingly barren ‹elds of race and sex discrimination law, the charmed passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act through the U.S. House and Senate and across a Republican president’s desk must have seemed vaguely surreal. The strongly bipartisan House vote in the summer of 1990 was a remarkable 377 to 28, the vote in the Senate an equally overwhelming 91 to 6.1 Rising to speak in favor of the bill, Republican cosponsor Orrin Hatch—not known for impassioned endorsements of new civil rights protections—had cried on the Senate ›oor.2 Senator Tom Harkin, who had earlier delivered his ›oor remarks in American Sign Language, said of bill following the Senate vote, “It will change the way we live forever.”3 Signing the bill into law, President Bush was equally effusive. Describing the nation’s historical treatment of the disabled as a “shameful wall of exclusion,” President Bush compared passage of the ADA to the destruction of the Berlin Wall: Now I am signing legislation that takes a sledgehammer to another wall, one that has for too many generations separated Americans with disabilities from the freedom they could glimpse but not grasp. And once again we rejoice as this barrier falls, proclaiming together we will not accept, we will not excuse, we will not tolerate discrimination in America. . . . Let the shameful wall of exclusion ‹nally come tumbling down.4 At the July 27 signing ceremony, held on the White House South Lawn to accommodate the large crowd of activists in attendance, President Bush cavalierly dismissed predictions that the law would prove too costly or loose an avalanche of lawsuits.5 Republican senator Bob Dole, a strong ADA supporter, admitted that the new law would place “some burden” on business, but found that burden justi‹ed because the act would “make it much easier” for America’s disabled.6 For traditional civil rights lawyers, this was incongruous fare. For the previous two months, Senators Dole and Hatch, along with Vice President Quayle, President Bush, and others in his administration, had been sharply denouncing the Civil Rights Act of 1990,7 pejoratively labeling it a “quota bill.”8 The soon-to-be-vetoed legislation, which in much-diluted form eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1991,9 sought to countermand a series of Supreme Court cases that, among other things, had virtually erased disparate impact theory,10 an accepted feature of Title VII jurisprudence since the early 1970s. The veto, which the Senate failed to override by one vote, represented a dispiriting defeat for traditional civil rights constituencies and their lawyers. The Civil Rights Act of 1990 was not the only employment rights casualty of President Bush’s veto power. Just a year before he signed the ADA into law, the president had vetoed a bill that would have raised the minimum wage from $3.35 an hour to $4.55.11 Stunning the congressional leadership , the veto came a mere ‹fty-one minutes after the bill had reached the president’s desk. On June 29, 1990, only two days after the ADA’s festive South Lawn signing ceremony, President Bush vetoed the Family and Medical Leave Act, which would have required covered employers to accommodate workers by providing up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave in cases of family illness or childbirth. In defense of the veto, Bush stated that such practices should not be mandated by the government, but should rather be “crafted at the workplace by employers and employees.”12 Neither the minimum wage hike nor the FMLA, which Bush vetoed again in 1992, would become law until passed by the next Congress and signed into law in 1993 by newly inaugurated President William Jefferson Clinton. It must have been dif‹cult for traditional civil rights lawyers, reeling from these many setbacks, to comprehend the triumphal enthusiasm with which Republican senators and administration of‹cials celebrated the passage of the ADA. How could such a transformative statute, requiring not only formal equality, as the nondiscrimination concept had traditionally been understood, but also structural equality—the accommodation of difference —have passed by such lopsided margins? How could it have garnered so much support from Republicans in the House and Senate, or from a Republican president who had in other contexts so vigorously resisted the expansion of civil rights protections? How could the president and the Republican congressional leadership embrace the...

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