Day in Washington

The Women's March on Washington (WMW) was a once in a generation kind of event. Nothing has invigorated such action since the right for women to vote. On January 21st we witness an event that crossed populations and groups of women like never before. It was about women with disabilities, women of color, trans women, women incarcerated by the justice system, immigrants, sex workers, pro-choice, pro-life.the list goes on. For many of us, this is not about parties or platforms abut a fundamental belief in the equality of all women.

All women.

And the recognition of the individual rights integral to that value.

The city was planning for 500,000 marchers. The final tally was estimated at closer to 1 million. Beyond Washington DC, people marched in almost 550 cities and towns in the U.S., and 100 more locations overseas. It was arguably THE largest single-day protest in American history.  But to create lasting change and to make an impact we also have to work at what comes after.

It has been just one month since the Women's March on Washington and a lot has happened since then - policies have been made, guidance's rescinded, executive orders signed (and overturned by the courts). To read the news and media reports of politics can be emotionally exhausting, disheartening, and paralyzing. How can we keep the fire, the passion, and the solidarity alive? There were a lot of articles about what to do next. Now, 30 days later, perhaps it is important to remind ourselves that we have the power and we make choices that can and do have an impact. Just a simple reminder of all the things we can do:

Don't limit your advocacy. There are many ways to take action and each person should carefully consider their time, commitment, and dedication. In the time that has passed perhaps you have already chosen your advocacy priorities. Examine how you feel. Is this working? Choose actions that play to your strengths; that let you engage, learn, grow, and resist. And you don't have to do it alone. Find others who share your passion. Lean on each other. It is a long road ahead.

This is a marathon, not a sprint. We must not allow time to dissuade us from our advocacy and normalize this new state of being, this new America. Stay active. Stay engaged.

Perhaps as critical as #1, this is to ensure your advocacy and efforts are inclusive of all women. The WMW has sought to ensure that the voices of all women are heard (with some successes and some failures). It is very easy to fall into the trap of working on issues that are pertinent to us and to ignore, forget, or overlook other groups.  Policies and politics can, and have been crafted to impact some groups more than others: undocumented women, women in the criminal justice system, poor women, women with disabilities, women of color, sex workers. We must always strive to reflect, center, and amplify the voices of those who are most directly threatened. It is also easy to become disheartened by actions, advocacy, and organizations that aren't getting it all right. Stay strong and always, always, speak out and demand accountability.

Our actions must embrace issues that impact all women or we will find ourselves carved up into small special interests.  Look around. Is your advocacy inclusive and diverse? Does it represent America, or only your small vision of it?

Stay informed. The assumption is that of course we're informed! The reason this is listed as a separate item is because of the increased pressure on the press and on mainstream media for what could be deemed splashy headlines and clickbait articles.

Hello and welcome to Day in Washington, your disability policy podcast. I'm your host Day Al-Mohamed working to make sure you stay informed.

In early January, the House of Representatives passed a package of changes to their standing rules. These changes would supposedly enhance the House's ability to exercise its €˜power of the purse'. (Congressman Morgan Griffith (R-VA)). Adoption of procedural rules is pretty normal for any new congress.  However, House Resolution 5, which in addition to attempting to move the Office of Congressional Ethics under more direct Congressional control (and which received significant amounts of public outcry), there was also another provision that's received some media coverage in Washington, but didn't quite capture the same level of attention. The Holman Rule.

The final version of House Resolution 5 includes the reinstatement of a very old Rule from 1876, called the Holman Rule. Let me start with some background. Congress tends to work along two tracks: authorizing and appropriating. Authorizing legislation is what we usually think of when we say legislation or bills. Congress members vote on language that authorizes specific events, agencies, projects etc. The second track, which most people might not realize is quite so separate is appropriations legislation which is where congress members vote on what to fund and how much to fund it.

The Holman Rule is specific to the appropriations track. It allows lawmakers to bring an amendment to an appropriations bill directly to the House floor that retrenches (meaning reduces) expenditures by:

the reduction of amounts of money in the bill;

the reduction of the number and salary of the officers of the United States; or

the reduction of the compensation of any person paid out of the Treasury of the United States.

At its core, it would seem the rule is to address saving money and (from a historical perspective) was used to help get rid of corrupt customs officials. Let me give an example of this. In the 1932 Treasury and Post Office Departments appropriations, there was a provision that said:

The offices of comptrollers of customs, surveyors of customs, and appraisers of merchandise (except the appraiser of merchandise at the port of New York), 29 in all, with annual salaries aggregating $153,800, are hereby abolished. The duties imposed by law and regulation upon comptrollers, surveyors, and appraisers of customs, their assistants and deputies (except the appraiser, his assistants and deputies at the port of New York) are hereby transferred to, imposed upon, and continued in positions, now established in the Customs Service by or pursuant to law, as the Secretary of the Treasury by appropriate regulation shall specify. . . .

So now that you have an idea of how it works, let's look at how things can get complicated.

The goal of the rule is to take care of bloated expenditures and to ensure that the executive branch can address poor actors when it comes to agencies. This is about accountability and it allows any rank and file member to focus on specific programs and offices they deem to be wasteful.

An example cited by the Washington Examiner (and if anyone has an example given by a legislator who voted for the amendment I'd prefer that), is the story of Elizabeth Rivera of Puerto Rico. She worked at the Department of Veterans Affairs. After pleading guilty to involvement in an armed robbery she was able to get her job back with the agency and win back pay for the period when she had been off the job.  I have to admit, I think that would be great use of the Holman Rule.

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA or Act) guarantees a minimum wage for 40 hours in a workweek and one and one-half times the employee's regular rate of pay for any hours worked over that 40. But there are exceptions. In the past you had to make less than $23,660 to get that mandatory overtime pay.  The Department of Labor published a rule on May 23, 2016 that increases that amount to $47,476.

For people with disabilities who rely on personal assistance services, most of which are funded by Medicaid, this had immense consequences. The key component is money. Many people who provide those services would now fall within the purview of the rule and so would have to be paid time-and-a-half for their hours over 40.  The American Network of Community Options and Resources (ANCOR), an association of over 1000 agencies that often provide this kind of in-home service gave an estimate that this would add over $1 billion in costs for agencies serving those with disabilities in the first year alone. State Medicaid rates do not take into account overtime.

In addition, in recent years, time and again, efforts have been made limit Medicaid. Block grants, per capita caps etc. Efforts to push the cost onto States and unfortunately States aren't or cannot pick up the difference. That means either workers are not paid adequately (which this rule's enforcement will address) or there is a decrease in quality (and amount) of services available to people with disabilities. For many, this makes the difference of whether they can live independently at all.

Obviously, there was significant pushback from the disability community as well as agencies providing services, including Congressional hearings and legal action

The Overtime Final Rule became effective on December 1, 2016. However, the Department of Labor is implementing a limited non-enforcement policy for providers of Medicaid-funded services for individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities in residential homes and facilities with 15 or fewer beds. This non-enforcement period will last until March 17, 2019. The idea is to give agencies (like DOL and HHS) and federal and state agencies and policymakers to better coordinate and understand the potential unintended consequences and ensure that the lives of people with disabilities and their ability to live independently are not harmed.

Of course, it isn't over. This is merely a delay of implementation.  Also, on the legal front, on November 22, a federal district court judge issued a preliminary injunction (State of Nevada v. United States Department of Labor (E.D. Tex., No. 4:16-CV-00731)). On December 8, the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit granted the Department of Labor's request for an expedited hearing of its overtime rule appeal. Of course in judicial time expedited means that the case won't even be heard for several months, and it'll take even more time beyond that for the case itself.  What that means is that the Trump Administration and Congress could choose to repeal the rule, or at the very least, direct the Department of Labor to drop its legal appeal.

Resources

USDOL Overtime Rule: https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/final2016/index.htm

Time Limited Non-Enforcement Policy for a Subset of Medicaid-Funded Providers : https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/final2016/nonenforcement-faq.htm

Federal Register Announcement for Non-Enforcement: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/05/23/2016-11753/defining-and-delimiting-the-exemptions-for-executive-administrative-professional-outside-sales-and

On this episode, we speak with Lainey Feingold about structured negotiation.

Lainey Feingold is a disability rights lawyer focusing on digital access, an international speaker, and the author of Structured Negotiation, A Winning Alternative to Lawsuits.

Structured Negotiation is a collaborative problem-solving strategy with a twenty year track record of resolving complex disability civil rights claims without lawsuits.  Lainey's Structured Negotiation negotiating partners include Bank of America, The City of San Francisco, Walmart, CVS and dozens of other public and private organizations. 

Lainey's book is packed with win-win stories of accessibility advocacy, all without lawsuits.  In 2017 Lainey was named one of the 13 Legal Rebels by the ABA Journal, the national magazine of the American Bar Association.  That year she was also named the individual recipient of the John W. Cooley Lawyer as Problem Solver award, given annually by the Dispute Resolution Section of the ABA. Lainey has twice been recognized with a California Lawyer Attorney of the Year (CLAY) award (2000 and 2014) for her digital accessibility and Structured Negotiation legal work.   

In the 1970's Bradley Lomax was an Oakland resident and member of the Black Panther Party (BPP). He also had Multiple Sclerosis and used a wheelchair.

In 1974, Lomax was working at the Panthers' George Jackson Clinic, which provided free community medical care as part of the BPP serve the people programs. Recognizing the need for more disability services and supports in his own community, in 1975, Lomax approached Ed Roberts (who had helped found the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley in 1972), with a proposal to open a Center for Independent Living (CIL) in East Oakland under Black Panther sponsorship. Less than a year later, with Lomax as one of a two-person staff, the East Oakland CIL opened in a storefront, offering basic peer counseling and attendant referral.

The BPP had no particular disability policy, but with Lomax's active participation in disability advocacy, they began supporting other initiatives, most notably the historic 504 sit-ins to force the government to implement Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.

Bradley Lomax was an active participant in the sit-in, a sacrifice which much affected his disability later in life, and afterwards was a member the contingent that took the disability message to Washington DC.

Quote from Corbett O'Toole, who stayed in the building for the duration of the protest, highlights how critical his involvement was:

By far the most critical gift given us by our allies was the Black Panthers' commitment to feed each protester in the building one hot meal every day..The Panthers' representative explained that the decision of Panthers Brad Lomax and Chuck Jackson to participate in the sit-in necessitated a Panther response..and that if Lomax and Jackson thought we were worth their dedication, then the Panthers would support all of us. I was a white girl from Boston who'd been carefully taught that all African American males were necessarily/of necessity my enemy. But I understood promises to support each others' struggles.

You can find out more about Bradley Lomax and the intersection of Disability, Solidarity, and the Black Power of 504 here: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1371/1539 

You can find out more about the Black History of 504 here: http://sfbayview.com/2014/02/black-history-of-504-sit-in-for-disability-rights-more-than-serving-food-when-will-the-healing-begin

As models with disabilities like Jillian Mercado, Madeline Stuart, and others start becoming household names, one might ask, where are the designers with disabilities? For a community that prides itself on nothing about us without us there seems to be a lot of models (with and without disabilities) wearing clothing made by nondisabled people. And thus, enters our shero. With an infectious laugh, infinite faith, and a drive like none other, Kathy D. Woods is part of an emerging trend of inclusive fashion advocates who see access to clothing that fits people with disabilities, as a critical element to self-confidence, and ultimately, to their success.

Kathy D. Woods is a the owner and operator of a woman's clothing  company showcasing fashions  for women, ages 25-45, who want to invest in quality clothing with impeccable fit, style, and timeless appeal. Unlike every other designer with a Singer in their bedroom and an Etsy page, she brings true sartorial skill to a boutique market in dire need of her talents. KDW provides fashionable, high quality clothing that is expressly designed for adult little people.

This former pre-school teacher with a background in special education, and entrepreneur decided to start a clothing venture after decades of struggling to find clothing that fit. If you bought to size, the clothing looked juvenile, if you bought for the age, the typical person with dwarfism swam in the fabric. So Kathy, as many LP women did before her and do today, was resigned to paying twice the price for clothingonce to purchase clothes and once to get them altered to fit her. But she came to want something different. Something for the LP community, by the LP community, where the profits could return to the base and be used to start internships, scholarship programs, programs to subsidize clothing for homeless or abused women with dwarfism to help them get back on their feet.

It's obvious the vision for KDW goes beyond fashion, and Ms. Woods finds inspiration in First Lady Michelle Obama her approach to raising expectations and pride among African-American women and girls. (She got to visit the White House, and meet President Barack Obama in 2015 when she was a guest at the 25th Anniversary celebration of the Americans with Disabilities Act.) Kathy is also spearheading her own production company and is actively working to help transform the perceptions of Little People globally, so that when girls with dwarfism turn on the TV, they'll be greeted by positive images of their community, versus negative ones.

In an interview with Alyssa Rosenberg in the Washington Post, Kathy D. Woods said You look at this generation of little people. They're attending college, and basically they need to dress the part. My brand will help build confidence and my goal is to provide little people women with the tools to help become successful. You look good, you feel good, Woods argues. When you try on clothes that fit your body, it's like an awakening.

For more information on Kathy Woods Designs, visit her website at http://www.kathydwoodsstore.com  or follow her on Tumblr http://kathydwoods.tumblr.com  or Twitter @kathydwoods.

On 15 November 1866 in St. Louis, Cathay Williams enlisted in the United States Army, 38th Infantry as a man named William Cathay. To date, she is the only documented African-American woman who served in the U.S. Army (until modern time).

From the St. Louis Daily Times, January 2, 1876:

The regiment I joined wore the Zouave uniform and only two persons, a cousin and a particular friend, members of the regiment, knew that I was a woman. They never blowed' on me. They were partly the cause of my joining the army. Another reason was I wanted to make my own living and not be dependent on relations or friends. Soon after I joined the army, I was taken with the small-pox and was sick at a hospital across the river from St. Louis, but as soon as I got well I joined my company in New Mexico.

She seemed an average soldier; she performed garrison duty adequately enough. She drilled and trained with Company A, and went scouting for signs of hostile Native Americans. There was no cause for her to be remarked upon either positively or negatively in any officer reports of record.

In January 1868 her health began deteriorating. On the 27th, she was admitted to the post hospital for rheumatism. She released, and then was admitted again on March 20th.  During her military career, she was in four hospitals, on five separate occasions, for varying amounts of time. On July 13, she was admitted into the hospital and diagnosed with neuralgia (a catch-all term for pain caused by a nerve, or parts of the nervous system). Finally, on October 14, 1868 William Cathey was discharged with a certificate of disability.

After this, she resumed her identity as Cathay Williams and worked in New Mexico and Colorado as cook, laundress and nurse.

In 1890, she was hospitalized in eighteen months though no mention is given of the specific ailment. In June 1891 she filed for an invalid pension based upon her military service. She claimed loss of hearing, neuralgia, and rheumatism. Upon a doctor's examination, pension records show that all her toes on both feet had been amputated, and she could only walk with a crutch.

From DeAnne Blanton's CATHAY WILLIAMS, BLACK WOMAN SOLDIER: It is unfortunate that so little is known of Cathay Williams. The information in her pension file together with the scattered references to her in military records is all that exists. The fragmentary references to her physical condition, however, provide some clues as to what may have caused of her various ailments during the course of her adult life. It is entirely possible that Cathay Williams suffered from mild diabetes.

The Pension Bureau rejected her claim on the grounds that no disability existed.

Resources

You can read more about her here Cathay Williams, Female Buffalo Soldier: http://www.buffalosoldier.net/CathayWilliamsFemaleBuffaloSoldierWithDocuments.htm

And Cathay Williams, Black Woman Buffalo Soldier:http://www.beyondblackwhite.com/cathay-williams-black-woman-buffalo-soldier/

The President's Executive Order on Gun Violence and Mental Health

Hello and welcome to Day in Washington, your disability policy podcast. I'm your host, Day Al-Mohamed working to make sure you stay informed. Today, I want to talk about the President's Executive Orders on gun violence.

There are a lot of things that are rolled up into that so I thought it might be useful to break them open a little bit, look at them and see what might be of interest here to the disability community.

One of the first things on there is that it talks about processing background checks 24 hours a day, seven days a week and improving notification of local authorities when certain persons unlawfully attempt to buy a gun. This sounds like a really good idea; I know there have been backlogs and it's been difficult to keep up and checks are going through as well as they can, so it really offers some substantial change. Again, the creation of the Internet Investigation Center to better track illegal online firearm sales as well as additional ATF agents for the enforcement and prosecution of gun laws - all sound really good. Of course that one in particular, it will come down to implementation. Does this actually get implemented to ensure it works effectively?

Now this next one is the point that made me think; it specifically says: "Increase mental health treatment and reporting to the background check system." Whoa, so including mention, automatically connects the two, "mental health" and "violence." The disability community has repeatedly cited statistics from research and from the government's own reports showing that individuals with mental health conditions are actually more likely to be victims of violence. So the presence of it here sets an expectation that could be problematic.

The Administration is proposing a $500 million investment to increase access to mental health care. That sounds pretty good.

So here's the real kicker, Social Security will include information in the background check system about beneficiaries who are prohibited from possessing a firearm for mental health reasons. Riiight (said sarcastically). Social Security will "include information." I have a problem with that.

Reading through, there are a few other issues. One was smart gun technology and also anyone who is "engaged in the business" of selling firearms must be licensed and conduct background checks on their customers." But let's go back to the mental health treatment and reporting.

So in the last seven years our country's made some fantastic progress in expanding health coverage for many americans and even before that there was the Mental Health Parity Act and the ADA and those were both pushing the way we think about mental health and mental illness, fighting to reduce stigma, increased services, and encouraging people to seek treatment.

The reports that SSA along with the Department of Justice will basically include in that database are basically 75,000 people who have a documented (and that's actually 75,000 per year) who have a documented mental health issue, receive disability benefits, and are unable to manage those benefits because of their mental impairment or have been found by state or federal court to be legally incompetent.

It reminds me of the way we treat people who use food stamps and the way I've heard politicians talk about the program and its recipients. They're all about preventing them from being able to buy soda or candy bars or junk food, adding restriction upon restriction.

Now we do hear about the few people who may game the system but at the same time