Live with Rachel @ This Woman Votes

Thank you Beth Cruz, Ms.Yuse, Lynette, NeuroDivergent Hodgepodge, Lynn L, and many others for tuning into my live video with Nick Paro and Disability Community! Join me for my next live video in the app.

I spent an hour live with Nieta Green, who founds and runs Disability Community for Democracy and publishes Nothing About Us Without Us, and Nick Paro, who joined partway through.

I opened where my own writing had left me, on the administration’s treatment of veterans. Nieta argues that veterans are treated better than the general disability community, and that people inside that community notice. My answer was that the fix runs upward rather than downward. Nobody should have to perform poverty to qualify for help.

On the June memo, Nieta’s read, backed by an attorney she trusts, is that the document is circular and contrary to case law, and that reading it closely grants it more standing than it earned. What it does functionally is hand the state plaintiffs in the Texas case a federal ally, with a federal response due in August. She traced the origin to opposition to consent decrees inside the White House. She also caught something I had underweighted. “Mental disabilities” is broad enough to reach ADHD and autism, which lands differently once you remember the registry proposals.

She then took the argument somewhere I had not: Olmstead gives IDEA’s least restrictive environment clause its teeth. This reaches classrooms and the students who finish at 21 rather than 18.

I raised private prison money and GEO’s stock performance since the inauguration. Nieta redirected me, and she was right to. The worst facilities in this country are state-run. States face licensing requirements and real liability in state court, which is a constraint the federal government does not carry. Her fear is state history and the ugly laws, with Willowbrook as the reference.

Which brought us to devolution. She laid out the three tiers: states, the District, and territories, where citizens have no voting representation and the funding arrives as block grants. She cited the Puerto Rico case where a man who earned SSI stateside was told to pay it back. I talked about re-qualifying my mother for memory care across a county line. Nieta explained why that varies, since some states run social services centrally and others push them to counties that set their own floors.

We all landed in the same place, and it is the clearest ask I have heard on this: codify Olmstead into federal law, with nothing else attached to it. Nick’s campaign is at broadbanner.com/crip-crow. There is a lobby day at the end of August.

Institutional care runs five to six times community care. Home care employs more people, most of them women.

Nieta closed on protest psychosis (Free PDF), the mid-century practice of reclassifying dissent as illness. Read about it before you decide it cannot reach you, because Stephen Miller is all about classifying protesters as “mentally unstable” and “deformed.”