Senate Passes Expansion of Rights Bill for Disabled

In a sweeping expansion of civil rights protections, the Senate late Thursday voted to bar discrimination against 43 million disabled Americans in employment, public transportation services, public accommodations and telecommunication services.

The landmark measure was adopted on a vote of 76 to 8 after a day of debate. It was endorsed by President Bush, despite widespread concern over the costs it would impose on businesses and local governments, especially for making buildings and transportation accessible to wheelchairs.

Advocates called the legislation, which is based on the protections provided to racial minorities and women by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a “bill of rights for the disabled.”

But skeptical senators said it could prove to be “a lawyer’s dream” because of new rights it provides for physically and mentally impaired persons, including recovered alcoholics and former drug addicts.

The complex, comprehensive federal law faces an uncertain fate in the House, where four committees have jurisdiction over it.

But the bill had strong momentum in the Senate, where it sailed through the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee by a 16-0 vote on Aug. 2. It had 63 co-sponsors even before debate began Thursday morning.

Among major provisions of the Senate bill:

--Employers of 25 or more people would be barred from discriminating against the disabled. Coverage would apply to firms with 15 or more workers two years later.

--Public accommodations such as restaurants, hotels, doctors’ offices, grocery stores, museums and other businesses would be barred from discriminating in the provision of services to disabled persons. State and local governments also would be covered. In addition to forbidding exclusion of the disabled, some additional services, such as reading a menu to a blind customer, would be required.

--New buses, trains and subways operated by public agencies would have to be accessible to people with disabilities, including those in wheelchairs. For private transportation, the bill would require that all new buses be accessible in six or seven years, depending on the size of the bus company. Key subway and railroad stations would have to be accessible within 20 years.

--The nation’s 1,500 telephone companies would be required to offer special “relay” services that would allow those with hearing or speech impairments to communicate with those without such disabilities through their regular telephones.

--Victims of AIDS and those afflicted by the HIV virus, which causes the deadly disease, would be covered by the anti-discrimination provisions.

--New construction of places of public accommodation and potential job sites would have to be “readily accessible and usable” to disabled people. Under another provision of the bill, however, buildings would not be required to install elevators if they are fewer than three stories high and have fewer than 3,000 square feet on each floor, unless the site is a shopping center or office of a health-care provider.

A two-decades-old California law already prohibits discrimination against disabled people, who are covered by the state’s fair employment and housing act.

The bill was supported in its original form by organizations of the disabled, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, gay rights activists and public health groups concerned with AIDS.

It broadly defines disability as “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities of such individual,” and a record of such an impairment “or being regarded as having such an impairment.”

Bowing to objections from conservatives, however, managers of the bill accepted an amendment that narrowed the definition of disability to exclude homosexuals, bisexuals, pedophiles, exhibitionists, voyeurs, compulsive gamblers, kleptomaniacs, pyromaniacs and those suffering from disorders stemming from current alcohol or drug abuse.

The President belatedly bestowed his blessing on the measure about a month ago. He was originally deterred by concerns that the measure would drive up costs and put a squeeze on smaller firms faced with the new requirements on access.

Under the bill, disabled people who are victims of discrimination could seek injunctions to halt the practice or get back pay if they are denied a job or fired because of their handicap.

A move to provide tax credits of up to $35,000 for small business firms for providing access to disabled people was thwarted when the Senate balked at waiving the requirements of the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction act. The tax credits proposed by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) got 48 of the 60 votes needed to waive the provision, with 44 senators opposed.

In contrast to the exemption for the smallest businesses in employment, Hatch said, even a mom and pop store is subject to all of the bill’s requirements in its treatment of customers and is subject to penalties ranging up to $100,000 for violations.

Despite his reservations, however, Hatch said he backed the bill, which he termed “the most sweeping civil rights legislation since the Civil War era.”