Former House Rep. Tony Coelho, the ADA’s lead author, in 2011.Mother Jones illustration; Kris Connor/Getty
On July 26, 1990, then-President George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law. The bill’s primary author was former Democratic House Rep. Tony Coelho of California, who was diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of 22. The ADA’s passage, which disability rights demonstrations like the Capitol Crawl contributed to, exemplified an era of more bipartisan efforts to push civil rights forward.
Testifying before the House in support of the ADA, in 1988, Coelho said it was “time that our government recognized our abilities and gave us the dignity to do what we can do.” Living with epilepsy was not easy for Coelho, who “became suicidal and drunk by noon” in part due to challenges in finding a job after he revealed his diagnosis. Coehlo had already been barred from studying to become a Catholic priest due to his disability, which was diagnosed during a medical exam required of applicants to the priesthood.
“There was no way we could get a major bill like this passed if it wasn’t bipartisan.”
Since the bill was signed into law, disabled Americans have benefited from a much wider array of protections in the workforce, in education, and in the ability to access public places and private spaces open to the public, such as stores and restaurants. But in a world where disability rights victories, and disabled people themselves, are being attacked by anti-DEI activists who have President Donald Trump’s ear, disability civil rights feel a little more fragile. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, another essential and wide-ranging item of civil rights legislation, is also in peril, most notably through a lawsuit filed by 17 Republican state attorneys general and led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, as my colleague Sarah Szilagy reported in October.
Ahead of the ADA’s 35th anniversary, I spoke with Coelho about the bill’s legacy, the importance of bipartisanship in its passage, and other provisions he wishes he’d included in it at the time.
The Americans with Disabilities Act is turning 35 this year. As the primary author of the ADA, what does that mean to you?
We’ve made a lot of progress. It obviously hasn’t solved every problem. Most civil rights bills don’t immediately— civil rights bills, including the ADA, are mere pieces of paper that have to be enforced. The Biden administration enforced it aggressively, probably the best of any administration.
I don’t know what the Trump administration will do. I’m very concerned. The inclination, I should say, is that they’re not going to enforce civil rights laws, and they’ve cut a lot of people out of the Justice Department. ADA has been the law of the land on a bipartisan basis for 35 years and now Trump is cutting DOJ enforcement, Social Security and education programs established to make sure those of us with disabilities are given the same opportunity to succeed as everyone else.
This last year, a major accomplishment was that we convinced the Biden administration to sign a rule in regard to access to the internet. We have not amended the ADA legislatively—on purpose, because there was an attempt to really gut the ADA a few years ago by the House of Representatives, when it was under Republican control. The ADA now is the law of the land, and in different varieties, the law of the land in over 50 different countries. So it’s had a huge impact internationally, and that’s an acknowledgment by those countries that those individuals in their country with disabilities should have some rights. Is it complete? No, but that’s true with all civil rights laws.
What did it take to secure bipartisan support for the ADA?
As a staffer [for Democratic Rep. Bernie Sisk], I tried to get my boss to introduce amendments to cover us in regard to housing or transportation. I found out the disability community was not protected, and we needed legislation to protect it. When I got elected, I didn’t realize there was a grassroots movement over the years trying to build up support for an ADA[-like] law. But I got a call from President Reagan’s Disability Council asking me if I would consider working with them in regards to legislation. We did a bipartisan, bicameral thing that was very deliberately done because I realized that there was no way we could get a major bill like this passed if it wasn’t bipartisan.
On the Senate side, it was extremely bipartisan. You started with [Kansas Sen.] Bob Dole, who was majority leader at the time, and then you had Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, a Mormon—he said to me at one point, “The Mormon church feels that you’re a child of God, and we support the disability community.” He was a conservative Republican, and then we had Dole—a moderate, but the leader of the Senate—and then Ted Kennedy, who had several family members with different disabilities, and was sort of the spiritual leader of the Senate; that made it really strong for Democrats. We had [Iowa Sen.] Tom Harkin, whose brother had a disability. So the four of them were a great bipartisan group, and three of them had personal relationships with disabilities.
On my side, I was the [House Majority] Whip, so I was third-ranking in the House, but I was the only one who acknowledged living with a disability. [Democratic House Speaker] Tom Foley called me in and said that he thought the bill was too broad, and the public would react negatively, and wanted me to break it up [into multiple pieces of legislation]. I told him, no, I had been elected just like he’d been elected, so I thought I had the same rights. Then on the 15th of June [1989], I left the Congress and asked Steny Hoyer to take the lead in the House. His wife had a disability, so it made it perfect.
What aspects of the ADA do you think have most changed disabled people’s day-to-day lives?
The most important thing is that it gave us our civil rights. In other words, [prior to the ADA,] people could openly tell us, because of your epilepsy, we’re not going to hire you, or we’re not going to hire you because you’re blind or are hearing impaired, or we’re not going to hire you because you use a wheelchair. They could do that openly, and aggressively, without suffering any consequences. The whole thing of basic civil rights and then enforcement by the Justice Department is [what] makes it so significant. If you want to get into specifics, for accommodations, I think that the basic right of having a civil rights law backing you up was the most significant thing the bill did.
What types of conversations have disabled people had with you about the ADA?
Those individuals who were born before 1990 understand how significant the ADA is; people born after that time just assume that that’s been the law for 100 years. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s kind of interesting the difference of people who come up to me and so forth. I get a lot of calls from people all the time [about] something they’ve been denied, and so then I try to place them [in touch with] the right people to go ahead and get it enforced. At times, I will personally get involved, depending on what it is. I just did a Walk to End Epilepsy, and several people came up and discussed different problems and so forth. I always say that I wanted to be a priest, didn’t get to be there, but I basically am a priest today—giving advice to people and helping people and so forth. So I think those things work in strange ways.
What needs to happen next, especially at the federal level? In what ways do you hope that politicians continue to push for better disability policy?
I do not want to open up the ADA, so there would be no amendments, because I want to protect it. If you open it up, you could lose it, and I don’t want that. In regards to what else we need, we need better enforcement. In regards to being hired for jobs, that’s what gives us our independence. Like everybody else you know, if you have a job, you can pay taxes. Five presidents I met with, I said, “I only know of one community in the world that wants to pay taxes, and that’s those of us with a disability because that means we have a job. That means we have the right to buy a home, rent a home, a car, get married, take care of a family.”
Another thing people don’t realize is that we can’t, in a civil rights law, do much more than provide those basic rights. And so a lot of people say, “Well, why didn’t you do X?” One of the things I wish we had done [in the ADA] was to include religion, including churches, and we decided not to, because we would never [have gotten] the ADA passed, and so we literally left that open.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Disabled employees of the federal government seeking to share information about workplace discrimination can contact Julia Métraux on Signal at @juliametraux.49.
