"A lesson for Bob Dole: old rules no longer apply; A disability treaty with broad support seemed like a sure thing to the ex-Senate stalwart. But his own party had other ideas" by Michael Kranish | Globe Staff, March 24, 2013
WASHINGTON — It was a moment Bob Dole had long awaited. He had brought the parties together to pass his greatest piece of legislation, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which required the retrofitting of buildings and sidewalks and provided an array of other rights.
Now he wanted the Senate to approve an international treaty that would spur other nations to pass their version of the law, making the United States a role model to help tens of millions of people around the world.
Do it for Dole, supporters urged.
But what had once seemed like a foregone conclusion – passage of the treaty — went awry amid infighting that few had foreseen. The deepest wound — some considered it betrayal — came from a Republican senator from Dole’s home state of Kansas....
The treaty’s defeat on Dec. 4, 2012, was a defining moment for the Senate, even if it received far less notice than crises such as the fiscal cliff.
Related: This Blog Post Has Been Disabled
A reconstruction by The Boston Globe of the events leading up the defeat provides an inside look at how the Senate, once known as the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” has become overwhelmed by partisanship — even on a seemingly uncontroversial measure aimed at helping some of the world’s most vulnerable people.
Related: Seeing Through the Kansas Haze
It demonstrates how outside groups and powerful constituencies exert outsized influence with arguments that are, in their best light, often tangential to the issue of the day....
Era of bipartisanship
The story begins with an era of bipartisanship that is almost impossible to imagine today....
Almost:
"The Senate voted 94-0, The overwhelming bipartisan vote
on an amendment to a sweeping, $631 billion defense bill reflected
fears about the Iranian threat and the United States’ unwavering support
for its closest Mideast ally Israel."
What that tells you is -- aside from Israel's iron-grip on AmeriKan foreign policy -- when partisanship raises its ugly head it is something the American want or need.
The 1989-90 session was one of the most bipartisan and productive of the past 40 years. Democrats and Republicans joined together to pass a new version of the Clean Air Act, the most sweeping environmental legislation in the nation’s history. The parties worked together — after then-President George H.W. Bush famously broke his “no new taxes” pledge — to cut the deficit and help put the nation on the path to budget surpluses....
The Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1989 in the Senate by an overwhelming bipartisan margin, 76 to 8, and passed the House the following year. As President George H. W. Bush signed it into law, he said the legislation “has made the United States the international leader on this human rights issue.”
That was a long time ago because we have lost that. Matter of fact, his son and the application of torture are primarily responsible for that.
Bush’s son, President George W. Bush, followed up by negotiating the international treaty on disabilities in 2006. There were two crucial steps to go. The Obama administration made the United States a signatory to the treaty in 2009. But under US law, treaties don’t take effect unless they are ratified by a two-thirds vote of the Senate.
And his administration's Justice department validated waterboarding.
Fast forward to 2012.
Supporters hoped the time was right to win ratification. Of the 193 countries in the United Nations, 155 have signed the treaty and 129 have ratified it, including countries such as Afghanistan, Cuba, and Russia. In an effort to win Republican support, treaty backers asked Dole to take up the fight. The old warrior, while weakened from his most recent hospitalization, promptly agreed.
No one disputed the difficulties faced by many of the 1 billion people worldwide with disabilities; in many developing countries, most children with disabilities don’t go to school and have little chance of gainful employment, not to mention basic accommodation, according to the State Department. Ratifying the treaty, supporters said, would spread American leadership around the globe as well as create new markets for US-made disabilities products.
Can't they ever do something just because it's right?
Related: Israeli device maker to move to Mass.
And when you think about the wars increase profits in a perverse way.
For a Congress that had been divided by debates over the deficit, health care, taxes, and other matters, passage of a Republican-brokered treaty with no direct cost to US taxpayers, aimed at helping some of the world’s most vulnerable people, seemed like a sure win....
But the culture of Washington had shifted dramatically....
Mix in the proliferation of partisan-oriented media, and the outsized power of small but well-organized groups in the Internet age, and the fractures of the current political era become evident....
Related:
Six Zionist Companies Own 96% of the World's Media
Declassified: Massive Israeli manipulation of US media exposed
Operation Mockingbird
Why Am I No Longer Reading the Newspaper?
Can't get any more partisan than that.
Still, when Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John F. Kerry began a July 12, 2012, hearing on the treaty, passage seemed all but assured....
Former President George H.W. Bush was enlisted to win over any remaining doubters, writing to the Senate that the treaty “would not require any changes to US law. It would have no impact on the federal budget,” while reminding senators that “disability rights issues have always enjoyed strong bipartisan support.”
Some of the most powerful testimony came from Bush’s former attorney general, Richard Thornburgh....
Then a witness named Michael Farris stunned many in the hearing room as he sought to demolish the arguments for the treaty.
Farris was speaking in his role as the president of the Home School Legal Defense Fund, a group with 83,000 dues-paying families that he founded in 1983. The group monitors government actions that potentially impact home schooling and says its mission is “to defend and advance the constitutional right of parents to direct the education of their children and to protect family freedoms.”
Farris, added to the witness list after Republicans on the committee learned of his objections to the treaty, testified that the treaty was “dangerous” to parents who teach disabled children at home. In a later radio interview, Farris would put his argument in the starkest terms: “The definition of disability is not defined in the treaty and so, my kid wears glasses, now they’re disabled; now the UN gets control over them.”
Kerry sounded sarcastic as he belittled Farris’s claims.
“So you believe that President George Herbert Walker Bush and Attorney General Thornburgh and majority leader Robert Dole, and a bunch of other people, just don’t understand the Constitution or can’t read the law?” Kerry asked Farris.
Farris responded that all of them had “reached incorrect conclusions.”
The committee approved the treaty by a 13 to 6 vote, with three Republicans joining Democrats in support. The six Republican opponents issued a minority report that said there was no reason to enter into an international “entanglement,” concluding: “Proponents of this treaty believe its ratification would signal to the world our commitment to advancing the interests of those with disabilities. The US Senate should not ratify this or any other treaty on these grounds.”
Supporters predicted quick ratification by the full Senate. But two weeks after the hearing, Farris’s assertion was echoed by two of the Republican Party’s most influential conservatives. Senators James Inhofe of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina, favorites of the Tea Party, wrote an op-ed for The Washington Times that said the treaty “calls for government agents to supersede the authority of parents of disabled children and even covers abortion.”
Dole and other supporters of the treaty viewed the charges as laughably false. The treaty legislation clearly stated that it required no change in US law, and there were no new abortion rights, they said.
But Farris seemed to have shaken the Republican Party. Plans for a quick vote in the full Senate were put on hold.
Home-schooler’s platform
To get to the office of Michael Farris, a visitor drives about an hour from Washington to arrive at the town of Purcellville, population 8,043, a mix of old-world Virginia and strip mall suburbia. It is here in the Appalachian foothills that Farris more than a decade ago established Patrick Henry College, a Christian liberal arts institution with 300 students. It also serves as headquarters for his political power base, the Home School Legal Defense Fund.
Sitting in his college office, surrounded by busts of George Washington and Patrick Henry and a wall-mounted elk head, Farris proudly explained how he set out to kill the disabilities treaty — and, not coincidentally, take on some within the Republican Party.
Farris has a history of run-ins with moderate Republicans. A father of 10, he was defeated in his 1993 bid to be lieutenant governor of Virginia after one of Dole’s closest colleagues, then-Senator John Warner of Virginia, took the unusual step of declining to endorse him. Since then, Farris has used his home-schooling organization to take on moderates that he says are ruining the GOP.
“There are two parties in Washington,” Farris said. There is “the evil party,” meaning Democrats, and “the stupid party,” referring to many Republicans, he said.
Unlike some Republicans who say the party should moderate its positions in the aftermath of losses in the 2012 campaign, Farris said the opposite approach is the best prescription. What Republicans need to do, he said, is listen to grass-roots members whose primary concern is liberty and sovereignty. That is why he seized upon the disabilities treaty. He saw it as an attack on American ideals and values.
And he saw something else. It is, he said, the ideal “wedge issue” for future political campaigns. It also played into fears that the United Nations threatens American sovereignty.
UN spokesman Dan Shepard, asked about Farris’s claim that the UN could dictate American disabilities policy, said it was “absolutely not true . . . it is not like any one swoops in and takes children. The UN doesn’t have an army, it doesn’t make laws for any member state . . . every member state is sovereign.”
Nonetheless, the assertion that the UN could supersede US law and have control over home-schooled children spread across the Internet. Within weeks, Farris’s group, along with allies, had placed an estimated 250,000 calls to the offices of wavering senators....
Farris, meanwhile, stood by his assertion that he understood the treaty better than Republican supporters such as Thornburgh. Farris, a graduate of Gonzaga University School of Law, said he has better legal training when it comes to treaties.
“I have an LLM in international law from the University of London,” Farris said, referring to a postgraduate degree that is similar to a master’s program. Asked for details, Farris said he didn’t go to London for the degree; it came in a “distance learning” course and culminated in a proctored exam at a local community college.
“He is just flat wrong,” Farris said of Thornburgh’s sworn testimony that the treaty won’t change US law. “If he wrote that on an international law exam, at any law school, he would fail.”
Thornburgh, describing Farris’s claims as “outrageous,” said in an interview, “It is one thing to face down a rational argument, quite another to deal with fantasies and exaggeration, which was the case here.”
But the campaign against the treaty had taken hold. As supporters planned for a December vote, Farris launched a public alliance with former senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania....
“foreign officials should not be put in a position to interfere with US policymaking.”
Unless they are Israeli.
‘A lesson about this town’
The day of the treaty vote began just like old times. It was Dec. 4, 2012, and Dole arrived on Capitol Hill in a wheelchair pushed by his wife, Elizabeth, also a former senator. It was not lost on Dole that many of the requirements of the ADA bill, including the ubiquitous “curb cuts” that made it easier to navigate sidewalks, now made it easier for him to get around. His empathy for people with disabilities had only increased. So as leaders in the disabilities community gathered with members of both parties to honor Dole’s work, the reception was intended as a prelude to the vote later in the day.
It was around noon when Dole was wheeled on to the Senate floor as the final debate was underway.
To one side was Dole’s old friend, Senator John McCain. Both had been losing presidential nominees, but their bond was deeper than that; during the five years that McCain had been a prisoner of war, Dole had worn a bracelet with McCain’s name. McCain had worked with Dole to win passage of the ADA 22 years earlier, and he had been part of the bipartisan group of senators working to win passage of the treaty.
McCain used part of his time during the debate to read a letter from Dole urging passage and was “deeply grieved” as he observed Republicans rejecting the plea of the party’s former leader.
“It was, frankly, a lesson about this town . . . a lesson about the transience of power and the meaning of friendship,” McCain recalled in a recent interview. McCain, meanwhile, didn’t know Moran “well” and didn’t have a chance to talk to the Kansas senator about his change of position. The schism within the GOP that day was as stark as McCain had seen it. The assertions by opponents “were just nonsense,” McCain said, but they had stuck.
Kerry, who was in charge of efforts to pass the treaty, sounded exasperated as he pleaded on the Senate floor for votes. Referring to Dole, Kerry said: “The father of the (1990) act is sitting here . . . in all those 20 years, has any child been separated from a parent? No. Has home schooling been hurt? No. In fact it has grown and is flourishing across the nation.”
Dole watched from his wheelchair, as his wife patted him on the shoulder. One by one, Republicans turned against Dole and the treaty. Midway through the tally, sensing the outcome, he rolled out of the chamber. There were at least a couple of senators, Dole said in the interview later, “who were for it and they saw it going down the tubes and they voted ‘No.’ ”
The Senate voted 61 to 38, five short of the two-thirds needed for approval. All of the 38 votes against the legislation were cast by Republicans. Many of them walked off the floor without greeting Dole. His fight was over, at least for the moment....
McCain, a 26-year veteran of the Senate, said it was his worst day in the chamber. “When you see the former nominee of the Republican Party on the floor in a wheelchair, in what might be his last real effort, voted down by Republican after Republican, I can’t tell you how sad that was to me,” McCain said.
Dole was devastated. “The home-schoolers thought the UN would be involved in how they dealt with their children,” he said. “I don’t know how they got there, but once the stampede starts, they notify their leaders to start ringing the phones, sending the e-mails. It’s really effective.”
Dole, famously acerbic, concluded: “There must be more home-schoolers out there than I thought.”
In the end, eight Republicans supported the bill, including four New Englanders: Scott Brown of Massachusetts, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine.
“The Pact,” under which disabilities legislation would be supported on a bipartisan basis, was dead....
And so is this post.
--more--"
Also see: As Down detection gets easier, choices harder
