[Athen] FW: Today in History - “The Most Inhumane Veto”: Politics and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973

[Lissner, L. Scott via athen-list]

“The Most Inhumane Veto”
Politics and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973


President Nixon signed the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 on this day, September 26th, in 1973.

Back in February of 1972, an expansion of the Smith-Fess Act<https://ldaamerica.org/legislative_news/100-years-vocational-rehab/>, (establishing the federal vocational training grants) that included a broad and potentially revolutionary anti-discrimination language that would eventually become Section 504<https://www.dol.gov/agencies/oasam/centers-offices/civil-rights-center/statutes/section-504-rehabilitation-act-of-1973>  as we know it.

“No otherwise qualified handicapped individual… shall, solely by reason of his handicap, be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

The Act easlily passed both houses of congress and was sent to President Nixon who pocket-vetoed<https://www.nytimes.com/1972/10/28/archives/nixon-uses-veto-to-block-9-bills-held-too-costly-30billion-hewlabor.html> it along with  eight other bills because he had committed to a federal budget cap.

In response, Senator Humphrey, Spoke on the Senate floor calling Nixon’s decision  “the most cruel, the most inhumane veto the President ever handed down”  Noting that his granddaughter Victoria<https://www.mprnews.org/story/2010/05/10/humphrey-granddaughter> had Down Syndrome Humphrey  reflected on the privilege that allowed his family to take care of Victoria; concluding with “but many families can’t.”

The disabled community followed with direct action.

  *   In Carbondale, Illinois, six students in wheelchairs blocked traffic amid a larger hunger strike. \
  *   In May Judy Heumann orchestrated protests at the annual meeting of the President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped. At the conference, a portion of the delegation symbolically left the room during a speech by Nixon’s daughter, Julie, while 200 disability advocates held a candlelight vigil that night at the Lincoln Memorial.

Meanwhile, Congress worked to rewrite the bill, reducing the overall budget but keeping new civil rights passage as Section 504.

Nixon signed the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 on September 26th, 1973.
“It is doubly gratifying for me to be able to sign into law today the Rehabilitation Act of 1973--first, because of the good the act will do in helping hundreds of thousands of our disabled citizens attain self-sufficiency, and secondly, because of the encouraging example which our agreement on legislation sets for future executive-legislative cooperation.” Nixon said in his signing message<https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-signing-the-rehabilitation-act-1973>.

The full implementation of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 would take another four years of activism, negotiation, and protests.

For an up close and personal view of this history I recommend Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist<https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/621090/being-heumann-by-judith-heumann/>.




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