We wrap up our series on the battle for the passage of the ADA with none other than Senator Tom Harkin. Senator Harkin was the lead sponsor of the ADA in the Senate and has spent his career being a steadfast ally to the disability community. In this interview we talk to him about what that was like, where we need to go from here, and he even stumps us with a bit of disability rights trivia.

Full transcript available at: https://www.ndrn.org/resource/ndr-harkin/

Michelle Bishop:

Welcome back to another episode of National Disability Radio. This is the final in our series on the anniversary of the ADA. So before we jump into a very special guest that we have for you this episode, I am one of your podcast hosts, Michelle Bishop, the voter access and engagement manager at NDRN.

Stephanie Flynt McEben:

And I’m Stephanie Flynt McEben, public policy analyst here at NDRN, and another host, or one of our other hosts, for our podcast today.

Michelle Bishop:

Okay. Clearly taking his side, Stephanie. Clearly taking his side.

Stephanie Flynt McEben:

Okay. Okay. But Jack has proven that he is worthy of host,

Michelle Bishop:

Producer and pro host extraordinaire, please introduce yourself.

Jack Rosen:

Thank you, Stephanie. I appreciate the support. Hi, producer and host, Jack Rosen, here. Really excited about today’s episode. This guest has been at the top of our wish list for a while now, and we are so thrilled to have him on. So I suppose we want to just get into it. Michelle, why don’t you tell the folks that we have on today?

Michelle Bishop:

We’re really excited today to be talking to the honorable Senator Tom Harkin, who was so instrumental in so much of the early disability rights movement and passage of the ADA. In 1974, Tom Harkin was elected to Congress from Iowa’s 5th Congressional District. In 1984, after serving 10 years in the US House of Representatives, Senator Harkin was elected to the Senate and reelected in 1990, 1996, 2002, and 2008. He retired from the US Senate in January of 2015.

I use the term retired loosely. He is still very active in the movement. As a young senator, Tom was tapped by Senator Ted Kennedy to craft legislation to protect the civil rights of millions of Americans with physical and mental disabilities. He knew firsthand about the challenges facing people with disabilities from his late brother Frank, who was deaf from an early age. What emerged from that process would later become his signature legislative achievement, the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In September 2009, following the death of Senator Ted Kennedy, Senator Harkin became chairman of the Senate Health Education, Labor and Pensions, or as we know it, HELP Committee. Senator Harkin believed that to serve in this capacity was to carry on the legacy which helped lead to the passage of the Affordable Care Act. In 2015, Senator Harkin and Ruth Harkin establish the Harkin Institute for Public Policy and Citizen Engagement at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa to inform citizens, inspire creative cooperation, and catalyze change on issues of social justice, fairness, and opportunity. The institute works to improve the lives of all Americans by giving policymakers access to high quality information and engaging citizens as active participants in the formation of public policy. Senator Harkin, thank you so much for joining us today.

Jack Rosen:

So we’re sitting here today with Senator Tom Harkin for our series commemorating the 35th Anniversary of the passage of the ADA. This is Producer Jack Rosen. I am joined by my co-hosts, Michelle Bishop and Stephanie Flynt. And to kick things off, we wanted to ask you, one thing we’ve found when talking to some of the folks who were involved in the passage of the ADA is that they recalled that was quite a fight to get people with HIV, AIDS and mental illness, as well as substance use disorders covered at the time, especially being 1990 and there was a lot of stigmatization of people with HIV, AIDS. Could you talk a little bit about that fight and why it was important for you to make sure those groups were included?

Senator Harkin:

Well, yes, because we didn’t want to leave any element of a disability group out of the coverage of the bill, want to be comprehensive. You start carving out one group, then there’s somebody else will carve out somebody else and the thing falls apart. The HIV, AIDS thing came up because there was so much misinformation about AIDS and how people got it. And a lot of it, let’s face it, was based on homophobia at that time. And we had some purveyors in the country and in the Senate of that kind of discrimination. Former Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina is predominant among that.

And so they tried to do whatever they could to carve out that portion of our populace. Well, we were successful in the Senate in keeping it out, but the House at the last minute added what was called the Chapman Amendment. Chapman was a congressman from Texas. I think that’s right, from Texas. And at the last minute they added the Chapman Amendment to preclude coverage of the ADA for anybody with HIV or AIDS. It wasn’t just AIDS, it was HIV too, a huge populace.

Well, as we pointed out at the time, everyone thought well, you only got HIV if you were practicing unsafe, same-sex. But we knew from medical studies and stuff that that just wasn’t so, it was absolutely not so at all. Well, Chapman Amendment came on at the last minute. Now keep this in mind, it’s a little bit in the weeds here on legislation. But we had passed our bill in September of 1989. It went to the House, got stuck in the House all winter until we had what was called the Capitol Crawl in March. After that, it began to get loosened up and we got it through the House, but not until the last minute the Chapman Amendment was at.

And so when we went to conference… Okay, so the Senate had one bill, the House had another bill. When we went to conference, the Senate voted to instruct conferees as did the house, to instruct conferees to accept the Chapman Amendment. Well, of course, I’m the head of the subcommittee. I’m the person leading the charge on this and negotiating with the house. And we met with the disability community. And basically, I’ll tell you, the disability committee held together. They said, “If they’re out, we’re out. We won’t have a bill.” They had worked for so long and so hard to get this done.

Well, so here’s what happened. We enlisted a person who had been sort of with us all along, but sort of dragged along kicking and screaming, and that was Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah. And finally, the disability community came to him and some people he knew in Utah and said, “Look, we can’t afford to let this bill die. We got to save this bill.” And so a few people came to meet with Senator Hatch and convinced him to have a substitute for the Chapman Amendment that basically said that in disregard of HIV, AIDS, et cetera, that we would rely upon the latest and best medical and scientific studies and results in order to determine the further course of action.

Anyway, it was just… got rid of the Chapman Amendment and substituted this language of we’ll take the latest scientific… And we sold it on that basis. We sold it to the Senate, even though they instructed them to accept the Chapman Amendment. We went back to them and said, “Look, this is a great compromise. Who can argue that we shouldn’t use the best scientific and medical information and data?” And that’s what we did, and that was the end of it. And so then the House went back and they passed it and it came back to the Senate and we substituted our bill, because we had some different things in it. So we took my bill, the bill we’d drafted and made it the final bill and sent it to the White House. That’s a long story, but it was very involved.

Michelle Bishop:

It’s actually one of my favorite stories, though, I have to say, Senator, about the passage of the ADA. It was such a moment in time and the way that the disability rights community really stood together-

Senator Harkin:

Yeah, you did.

Michelle Bishop:

… in a business where it would be very easy to say, “Okay, we’ll cut these folks out and we’ll get this for the rest of us.” The way the community really stood together and the way that you released stood your ground as well for what was right for people with disabilities.

Senator Harkin:

Well, I’ll tell you a little story that happened before, before the Chapman Amendment, but it was right about that same time. We still had some people in the disability community that were just… They wanted this, they wanted that, and I understood that. So I got Pat Wright and some others too from California. Who am I thinking of? I just lost the name in my… Anyway, Pat Wright was there from Oakland. Who am I thinking of? The Ed Roberts Center?

Michelle Bishop:<