Warren puts disability policy on stage
Her plan exceeds other candidates’ on an ignored issue
Christine Motokane could receive long-term care to help her with daily tasks like cooking. Matthew Cortland could marry his longtime partner. Christin Lucas could stop worrying that her son’s school might put him back in the isolated classrooms that made him suicidal.
This is some of what’s at stake in a newly prominent debate over disability policy. For months, Democratic presidential candidates have built on one another in this arena, culminating last week with a plan from Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts whose scope shocked many advocates.
That plan and the way Warren developed it, with a working group of about a dozen people with disabilities, reflect a sea change. More presidential candidates than ever are acknowledging how many issues, from criminal justice to student debt, affect people with disabilities, who make up a quarter of the country’s adult population. And more people with disabilities are shaping the policies that could affect them.
Warren is not the only candidate with a new approach. Several activists praised Julián Castro, the former housing secretary who ended his campaign and endorsed Warren this month, for his attention to disability policy. Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has an extensive plan.
And Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota released a proposal Friday — developed with disability rights groups, her campaign said — that would, among other things, expand home- and community-based services, make technologies like speech-generating devices more accessible, increase Social Security disability payments and strengthen anti-discrimination laws.
But the disability community has responded most positively to Warren’s plan.
“It is the most comprehensive thing I have seen in my 20 years of looking at these things,” said Jason Dorwart, a theater professor at Oberlin College who is quadriplegic.
The plan is sprawling, touching on health care, education, employment, Social Security, technology, housing, incarceration, police brutality and environmental justice.
It overlaps with other candidates’ plans: For instance, Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, former Vice President Joe Biden, Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Bernie Sanders of Vermont all want to fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which is meant to guarantee free public education for children with disabilities, and end the subminimum wage, which allows some workers with disabilities to be paid cents an hour based on the argument that it will make employers more likely to hire them.
But in other areas, Warren’s plan goes further.
Several candidates want to change rules that keep recipients of Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income in poverty, but Warren’s proposal is particularly detailed, including on eligibility and income limits. Advocates also noted sections on helping deaf children learn language skills and on the threats people with disabilities face in police encounters and natural disasters, as well as the plan’s attention to how disability and race are linked.
Warren has said she had asked her staff to create the group after hearing from people with disabilities at her campaign events.
“The personal stories caused us to rethink parts of current federal policy that badly need to be rewritten,” she said in an interview.
Warren “sees that things like the plastic straw ban or the California wildfires all have disability rights components,” said Jasmine Harris, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis. “Disability is a lens by which we can view how certain issues disproportionately impact people with disabilities. That is the disability scholar’s dream, to hear that.”
People with disabilities described how plans like Warren’s could change their lives.
Motokane, 27, who has autism, said she had sought Medicaid coverage for an aide to help her with things like cooking, budgeting and transportation. But her salary as a school paraprofessional in rural Washington state puts her above the income limit for that coverage — a limit Warren wants to raise.
Another rule Warren wants to change limits the assets SSI recipients can have so that marrying someone with, say, $5,000 in a retirement account means losing benefits. Because of that, Cortland, a lawyer who was part of the working group, can’t afford to marry his partner of 12 years.
In interviews with a dozen activists and people with disabilities, only one criticism of Warren’s plan was raised: its lack of an explicit commitment to inclusive education, in which children with disabilities are taught in regular classrooms with accommodations, not in separate special-education rooms. Several studies have shown that children do better academically and socially under inclusive education.
Warren, who has often spoken about her experience as a special-education teacher, is committed to inclusive education, her campaign said, adding that several elements of her plan — including more funding for paraprofessionals — would promote it. But her plan sets no targets or timeline for that.
By contrast, Buttigieg’s plan says that by the end of the 2025 school year, 85% of students with “intellectual and multiple disabilities” should be spending 80% or more of the school day in a regular classroom.
Lucas, of Bay Village, Ohio, said that when her son Bobby, who has Down syndrome, was put in a separate classroom in second grade, he became so depressed that he said he would kill himself. Bobby is now in fifth grade and in a regular classroom, and Lucas said that he was doing well — but that she was constantly afraid a new administrator could remove him.
“Just because that segregated room exists, it’s a constant threat for him,” she said.
Many of the candidates’ proposals would require congressional approval, which could be a challenge if a Democrat is elected president but Republicans control either chamber. For instance, one current piece of legislation, the Disability Integration Act, has 34 cosponsors, but only two are Republicans. And the Trump administration is trying to move in the opposite direction by subjecting SSI and SSDI recipients to more frequent reviews of whether they still have severe enough disabilities.
Even so, Cal Montgomery, 52, an activist in Chicago who has autism and uses a wheelchair, said proposals like Warren’s — as well as Buttigieg’s, Castro’s and Sanders’ — had given people with disabilities something they had long lacked: clarity on how candidates would help or hurt them.