Three South Carolina voters with disabilities, represented by the NAACP, filed a lawsuit on Friday against the state’s election commission and Republican attorney general Alan Wilson to challenge rules that limit how disabled voters can receive voting assistance, and who is eligible. South Carolina only allows voters “who are unable to read or write or who are physically unable or incapacitated from preparing a ballot” to receive ballot assistance, limiting that assistance to an immediate family member or “authorized representative”—and imposes felony penalties on any individual who helps more than five voters by either requesting or returning an absentee ballot.  The three voters challenging the law currently live in nursing homes, where many residents rely on staff members they trust to help them vote.  They contend that South Carolina’s draconian voting restrictions violate Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act, which commits to protecting the right for “any voter who requires assistance to vote by reason of blindness, disability, or inability to read or write” to receive such assistance from a person they choose. The Voting Rights Act has come under consistent attack by GOP-governed states, particularly in the wake of Republican upset losses and near-losses; those attacks have largely been upheld by the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, which has gutted some of the act’s crucial provisions and opened the door for an unprecedented wave of anti-voter state statutes. The new suit calls for the court to permanently block South Carolina from enforcing these limits and order the state’s election commission to oversee the revision of voter guidance to comply with the VRA. The South Carolina attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for comment; the state’s election commission said that it does not comment “on active legal matters.” As my colleague Julia Métraux wrote last year, polling stations are failing disabled and chronically ill voters in both Democratic- and Republican-leaning areas: “What may be accessible to some disabled people may not be for others. That’s why it’s crucial to move towards more accessible options.” 

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Hamm v. Smith, a death penalty case that will decide whether intellectual disability can be ruled out on the basis of IQ tests alone. Long before he was convicted of murder in 1997, Joseph Clifton Smith was placed in schooling for an intellectual disability. Smith had five documented IQ test scores by the time he was tried, all around the bottom five percent of the population—four of which, his legal team has argued, fall in the range of mild intellectual disability. The state of Alabama disagrees: anyone scoring 70 or above on one test, its attorney general contends, is intelligent enough to execute. In 2022, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that argument—setting the stage for a Supreme Court turnaround on IQ and capital punishment. > “If you tilt your head just right and squint…without considering anything > else, then you get the result [Alabama] thinks you should get.” The Supreme Court has previously stated that IQ tests alone fail to holistically determine intellectual disability, in 2002’s Atkins v. Virginia—which also established that executing people with intellectual disabilities violated the Eighth Amendment—reaffirmed in 2014 in Hall v. Florida, and most recently in 2017’s Moore v. Texas. But Atkins and Hall were close decisions, and the Court’s conservative majority has since grown. “It’s important to have a holistic assessment of the person,” said Shira Wakschlag, general counsel and senior executive officer for legal advocacy at The Arc, such as educational records and other documentation from childhood. IQ scores are a factor in determining intellectual disability, Wakschlag said, but they vary, and the tests don’t always offer consistent results. An amicus brief from the American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and Alabama Psychological Association in support of Smith’s case similarly argued that “because the diagnostic inquiry is necessarily holistic and requires the exercise of clinical judgment, no single datum—such as IQ test scores—is dispositive of intellectual functioning.”  An October filing by Alabama’s Department of Corrections commissioner, John Q. Hamm, pushes for a very narrow definition of intellectual disability defined by an IQ below 70, and argues that “the ‘holistic’ rhetoric’ is ‘just window dressing’ for a novel and indefensible change in constitutional law.’” “If you tilt your head just right and squint, and apply this particular statistical principle in isolation, without considering anything else, then you get the result that [Alabama] thinks you should get,” said University of New Mexico School of Law adjunct professor Ann Delpha, whose work focuses on intellectual disabilities and the justice system. “That’s not what intellectual disability is about.” “The court has said repeatedly…at different times, that intellectual disability is determined through clinical judgment, through a comprehensive analysis,” Wakschlag said. “It is not a number.” The Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case is perhaps unexpected, given the clear precedent in its rulings that IQ tests are not enough to establish intellectual disability, and may signal a likely break with precedent. A decision that effectively overturns the Court’s past rulings on intellectual disability and the death penalty would encourage states to define down intellectual disability, and any safeguards that come with it, in their criminal justice systems—in line with a wider push, echoed by conservative proposals like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to strip disability protections from schools, workplaces, and other sites of public life.

Comedian Megan Sass has been struggling to get their health insurer to cover intravenous immunoglobulin for more than a year. The treatment, which addresses a genetic antibody deficiency, requires antibodies from blood donors. Without insurance, it’s unaffordable. And with the looming expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies, Sass’ insurance will soon cost $1,300 a month. “I am not at a place where I’m been able to joke about this,” they said. ACA marketplace subsidies, first implemented in 2014, expanded greatly during the Biden administration, allowing millions more people to afford private health insurance. But enhanced premium tax credits are set to expire at the end of 2025. As ACA architect Jeanne M. Lambrew told me in October: > When the Biden administration came in during the pandemic, they tweaked the > premium tax credits to improve them, which doubled enrollment. It increased > the racial diversity of enrollment. It increased [the number of] low-income > people enrolled. It removed a cliff, so when people’s income increased, they > didn’t like fall off and have nothing. All that led to great gains and all > that is at risk. For contractors and freelancers in particular, the expiration of these enhanced subsidies could decide whether or not they can afford health insurance. According to KFF, around half of adults who purchase ACA marketplace plans are self-employed, small business owners, or their employees. Disabled people who work are 50 percent more likely to be self-employed than non-disabled people, meaning that people with existing health issues are at disproportionate risk of losing private health insurance for affordability reasons. The ACA offers disabled people “options that many other people take for granted,” said Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director of the Center for American Progress’ Disability Justice Initiative, especially given the ties between insurance and employment. The situation is especially frustrating for chronically ill and disabled contractors who watched Democratic leadership in Congress abandon a shutdown meant to protect those subsidies; President Donald Trump, during Thanksgiving week, then backtracked on a supposed plan to extend the tax credits when faced with the displeasure of congressional Republicans. New Hampshire therapist Amanda McGuire is infuriated that Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) voted to end the government shutdown without a deal to extend ACA tax credits: after all, McGuire created a video that Shaheen’s team posted on social media during the shutdown advocating for the importance of the ACA. McGuire feels betrayed. McGuire doesn’t qualify for ACA subsidies, though she expects to have to buy a marketplace plan next year as her disabilities, including multiple sclerosis, increasingly compel her to reduce her working hours. McGuire’s therapy practice focuses on patients with chronic illnesses and disabilities, and she’s even more afraid of what the future holds for them. “A lot of them can’t even look at the options in the marketplace right now, because they know they’re going to be priced out of policies,” McGuire told me. “As someone with chronic illness, you can’t just go without insurance.” Kathryn Sullivan Graf, a contractor who works as a writer and editor in Arizona, has multiple sclerosis; she expects to pay around $300 more a month and to have to seek new specialists. She was relieved when her neurologist assured her that he’d remain her neurologist no matter what happened—”but that’s just one of my providers,” Sullivan Graf said. Sass doesn’t believe that politicians on either side of the aisle are doing enough. Members of Congress, Sass noted, get comprehensive health insurance through the government—so they can’t personally experience the stakes. “Obviously, the main culprits are Republicans,” Sass said. “But the system,” they said, was either “broken, or it was intentionally designed badly.”

On Thursday, President Donald Trump once again found it acceptable to use the r-word, directing it towards Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, in a Truth Social post which also attacked Somali immigrants in the state. “The seriously [r-tarded] Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both,” Trump posted. For Republican Indiana State Senator Michael Bohacek, Trump’s most recent use of this anti-disability slur was “the final straw” in his decision not to support Indiana redistricting in support of Republicans winning more seats. On Friday, Rep. Bohacek posted the following on Facebook: > Many of you have asked my position on redistricting. I have been an > unapologetic advocate for people with intellectual disabilities since the > birth of my second daughter. Those of you that don’t know me or my family > might not know that my daughter has Down Syndrome. This is not the first time > our president has used these insulting and derogatory references and his > choices of words have consequences. I will be voting NO on redistricting, > perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and > behavior deserve a congressional majority. In a Facebook comment, Bohacek’s wife, Melissa, said she supported her husband, writing, “for families like ours, hearing the same mocking, derogatory language from our president isn’t abstract. He didn’t almost say or do something hurtful, he did.” According to the Indy Star, the Indiana State House of Representatives is set to meet on December 1 to discuss a redistricting map, and the Indiana State Senate is supposed to vote on the map on December 8. As I’ve previously outlined, Trump has a long history of making ableist statements and holding deeply harmful ideas about disability. In October 2024, at a dinner for Republican donors, Trump referred to then-Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris the r-word. He also has a pattern of referring to people he doesn’t like as “intellectually disabled” in a negative way, underlining his ableist views. The National Down Syndrome Society also condemned Trump’s latest use of the r-word, writing that “as the language used by our leaders carries significant weight in shaping actions and societal attitudes toward individuals with disabilities, we are dismayed and disheartened that President Trump used this harmful term in a recent social media post.”

On November 29, 1975, Republican President Gerald Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act into law, which later became the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). IDEA requires that disabled students have access to public education, discourages segregating disabled kids from their peers, and that qualifying students have access to individualized education plans, more commonly known as IEPs. IDEA does not apply to education in private schools. “Before our disabled elders secured our rights under the law, disabled kids were locked out of systems and out of their potential,” Rep. Lateefah Simon (D-Ca.), who is blind, told me in a statement. Many disability advocates are concerned about the state of education for disabled kids. Continued attempts to dismantle the Department of Education by President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon, as well as attempts to fire their staff, put the oversight that disabled kids’ needs are met at risk. Such oversight includes putting districts on notice for funding if they overpenalize Black disabled students, for instance. Then, there is the longstanding issue that IDEA has never been fully funded, meaning that the federal government is not funding IEPs to 40 percent. “Congress must protect and fully fund the IDEA to ensure future generations of disabled children have the supports and services they need to thrive in school,” Simon continued. “Our civil rights are not up for negotiations.” This is not to say that all students’ needs are adequately met under the IDEA. Jordyn Zimmerman, a nonspeaking autistic person, told me that she did not have access to effective communication via iPad until she was 18. “When I finally gained access to effective communication,  required under IDEA  and also the ADA,  there was a realization that I could learn, and I was slowly included in the school community, until I graduated at the age of 21,” Zimmerman said, who is the board chair of CommunicationFIRST. “So that really highlights,  both the flaws, but also the power in when the spirit is fulfilled with intentionality.” Zimmerman is also very concerned about attacks on the Department of Education. “Without a strong Department of Education, states can redirect money away from students with disabilities, so that high-quality education will only exist for some,” Zimmerman said. “Students also won’t get the funding for the therapies, assistive technology, and specially-designed instruction that students need, and families depend on.” > “I will fight that with everything that I have, because IEPs are protection > for these kids.” Samantha Phillis, an advocate with Little Lobbyists, told me that her two daughters, who are in public school, are on IEPs, one of whom is autistic and one has spinal muscular atrophy. Phillis is currently experiencing her school trying to walk back her IEP, which she suspects is common for kids with disabilities who appear to have lower support needs. “I will fight that with everything that I have, because IEPs are protection for these kids,” Phillis said. Phillis’ daughter with spinal muscular atrophy also has a nurse with her at all times in school due to her complex health needs. The nurse receives some funding through Medicaid, so Phillis is also terrified about how Medicaid cuts will impact her daughter’s ability to attend school. “It’s one of the biggest heartbreaks I think I’ve ever experienced in my entire life is seeing how people like my daughters are affected by this administration,” Phillis told me. There have not been recent attempts to repeal IDEA yet, but this is a concern for Nadia Hasan, a woman with cerebral palsy who credits IDEA with helping her succeed in school. “There’s just a lot more like isolation and lack of opportunity,” Hasan told me. Marleen Salazar, a Texan with learning disabilities who is now an undergraduate student at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, credits her special education teachers for helping her learn to advocate for herself. “They were very much a very key part of building me that confidence and advocacy to make sure that I expressed what I needed and what I didn’t need,” Salazar told me. This advocacy included being able to take standardized tests in a room by herself, as well as getting extended time. Salazar’s younger sister, who is dyslexic, now has accommodations as well. Salazar has concerns about what will happen if funding is rolled back. “The fear is if funding is cut, or the state doesn’t want to provide these resources anymore, what does that mean for her in the future?”

Even attending university in the 1960s was a revolutionary and complicated process for Ed Roberts, who was paralyzed by polio in his early teens. Now known as the father of the independent living movement, Roberts—faced with many structural hurdles to moving through society—began pushing as a young man to win disabled people the resources to live in their communities, rather than in restrictive and often brutal institutions. His activism led to the development of independent living centers, which assist with everything from helping people find personal aides to helping to sign them up for affordable, accessible housing in to guarantee as much personal freedom and agency as possible to people who would once have been forced into dehumanizing circumstances.  As a disabled person who went to graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, also Roberts’ undergraduate and graduate school, I knew of Roberts’ accomplishments—but not so much the details of his struggles, both around adjusting to becoming disabled and in the fight to launch his centers across California and eventually the country. > “It’s a beautiful American story, and what I mean by American is the story…is > about the marginalized coming together.” Chapman University disability scholar Scot Danforth’s new book, An Independent Man: Ed Roberts and the Fight for Disability Rights, covers just that. Danforth delves into other shortcomings, like limitations in the diversity of the independent living movement along race and gender lines. With mostly white figures leading the independent movement, he writes, “it was undeniable that disability rights was a predominantly white project,” notwithstanding the contributions of others like Black disability activist Brad Lomax.  I spoke to Danforth about Roberts’ life, the importance of his work, the origins of his activism, and the expansion of the independent living movement.  With disability rights under attack, why is it crucial to study Roberts’ life?  I think it’s important for people to not only understand what the disability rights movement achieved: the average everyday folks out in public, they see curb cuts, they see accessibility, they see parking spots. They’re aware of a certain amount of accessibility in society and most of that relies on a series of laws, Section 504, ADA and other laws. But what people tend not to know is the stories of how all of that was achieved, and the laws themselves, frankly, unless you’re a lawyer, are probably pretty boring. The stories are fascinating. The people and, you know, for me to get to write about Ed Roberts, Judy Heumann, Justin Dart, and on and on and on. It’s a beautiful American story, and what I mean by American is the story—which we’ve seen over and over in different kinds of civil rights movements—is about the marginalized coming together and unifying and saying, “We’re going to fight back, and we’re going to fight to be valued. We’re going to fight to have our place.” Catherine Dugan, left, holds notes while Ed Roberts testifies in 1977 at a congressional hearing in San Francisco on increased access and rights for disabled people.Clem Albers/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty People say, “Oh, I know we have a Martin Luther King [Jr.] Day.” They probably don’t know much more that, but almost no one knows stories of the disability rights movement, and people like Ed Roberts doing incredible things to build the very things that are being attacked right now. > “We’re up against people who think people with disabilities don’t belong in > society at all. It’s a complete regression to early eugenics.” The obstacles that stood in Ed Roberts’ way were mostly ignorance and incompetence. People didn’t wake up in the morning and say, “I’m out to fight those disabled people because they’re bad guys.” That wasn’t what they’re up against. They’re up against people getting disability wrong, thinking that it meant sickness and weakness, thinking people couldn’t live full lives. But now, we’re up against people who think people with disabilities don’t belong in society at all. It’s a complete regression to early eugenics, from the early 1900s. What role did Roberts’ mother, Zona, play in helping Ed Roberts get on the path to cause change?  Zona taught Ed how to fight. She was not comfortable with fighting and was not comfortable with conflict and anger. When I interviewed her, she told me that she was not comfortable being angry. But there was that first time Ed was about to graduate from high school, and the school officials told him and told Zona that Ed could not graduate because he still needed to meet requirements for physical education and driver’s education. And at first, Zona thought they were joking—but then she realized they really meant it. She took it to a number of different administrators in the district, and at one point, the district sent the assistant superintendent to her house—and she thought this was ideal, because Ed’s iron lung, big, massive steel lung that did the breathing for him sat right in the middle of of the living room. Although he typically wouldn’t be there in the afternoon, they put him there in the afternoons for this visit, because she wanted to make it obvious that this was ridiculous, and the man didn’t pick up on the cues at all. He looked down in Ed’s eyes, and he said, “You wouldn’t want a cheap diploma, would you?” And Zona, a small woman, she just leaned against that guy and bum-rushed him out the front door. And that was just the start. Later on, when they got to Berkeley, there were lots of meetings because the Department of Rehabilitation said that Ed was “infeasible,” meaning that he wasn’t worth their money. And so, although he was admitted, there was no way he was going to go. They had to appeal that decision through multiple levels of bureaucracy to get support from the California Department of Rehabilitation—ironically, the organization that Ed later was the leader of—but at every step, she was fighting for him, and he was learning from her how to fight. So really, throughout his entire life, she, more than anyone, was his mentor and supporter. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the founding of the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley. What made the CIL a radical idea?  > “[Roberts] really became the troubadour who ran out and told everyone, ‘Look > what we can do for ourselves.’” This was the early 1970s; there already was a concept called independent living that was circulating through the vocational rehabilitation field, but what they meant was intensive skill training to try to teach people with various kinds of disabilities how to do more for themselves without assistance. Essentially raising their skill level so they could, you know, take care of making their own food, bathing and dressing and everyday tasks. That was not really a useful idea to many of the early disability rights leaders in Berkeley, because they had different levels of paralysis, and succeeded because they had a personal assistant. This idea of independent living is about getting the right kinds of assistance under the direction of the disabled person: put that person in charge.  The center was radical, because it was completely self-help. The idea was disabled people helping disabled people. And that was crazy to the medical people and the [Department of Rehabilitation] folks. That was like saying the patients are going to cure themselves. [But] they weren’t curing themselves. They knew how to help one another. They understood and not only knew how to help one another, but they they found tremendous social support in that place and in that group. So it became a source of pride, something they owned. Ed, of course, saw it and was aware of this, and he thought there should be one of these on every corner. This should be across America—which is what we have now. There are about 400 across the US, and he spread the idea all over the world: Europe, Australia, Canada, [and] Japan. He really became the troubadour who ran out and told everyone, “Look what we can do for ourselves.”  How did Roberts work from within the California government to push for the expansion of independent living centers and disability rights in general? Expanding the CILs [Centers for Independent Living] was his really his highest priority. He did a lot of work on a whole long list of laws that had the support of Jerry Brown, who was governor. They passed many access laws, everything from access to parks, government buildings, polling places, on and on and on. But the CIL funding, he knew, was the real key to spreading independent living and independent living centers around the country, and getting government money behind it. It wasn’t going to make it purely on donations and grants and the kinds of things that had funded the Berkeley operation. > “The cultural response to disability in the ’70s was to tell young people, > ‘You’re sick, you’re frail, stay at home, don’t do very much, don’t get out > and have a life.’ And Ed was pushing people to do the opposite.” Ed worked on a bill with [future Berkeley mayor] Tom Bates, who was an assemblyman that Ed already knew well and [who] loved to work with the disability community. He worked closely with the CIL and Judy Heumann, and they put together a bill to fund 10 independent living centers in the budget every year. They got that passed.  In 1978, the federal government also took this up as part of revising the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, and so they were considering independent living as part of that at the federal level. Ed fought for that and really made an extreme effort to arrange for there to be congressional hearings. But despite his efforts, they only appropriated a small amount of funds initially. Over the years, they kept at it, and those funds increased later, and now we have over 400 around the country. What lessons do you think young disabled people can learn from Roberts’ work? I’m trying to think of what Ed would want to teach. In the ’70s, he went around and made quite a few speeches encouraging people with disabilities to take more risks. A strong part of the cultural response to disability in the ’70s was to tell young people, “You’re sick, you’re frail, stay at home, don’t do very much, don’t get out and have a life.” And Ed was pushing people to do the opposite. You need to take risks. Ed’s risks were a little extreme. He went whitewater rafting down the Stanislaus River. He was like, “You’ve gotta get out and show people that we are alive and we’re here and we’re living fully. We’re not just patients.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

On Wednesday, a group of six Democratic members of Congress, led by Rep. Lateefah Simon (D-Calif.), raised concerns that the federal government is “failing to protect federal contractor workers with disabilities” in a letter sent to Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. “The Trump administration is waging a war on disabled people and working to undo the hard-won rights our elders secured,” Simon said in a statement. “They want to roll back protections, weaken enforcement, and make our communities invisible again.” Under Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act, landmark disability rights leigslation which has been in effect since 1973, the federal government is supposed to take proactive steps to hire contractors with disabilities, provide accommodations, and not discriminate against them. As I reported in July, Chavez-DeRemer’s Labor Department is in the process of rulemaking to end goals for companies with federal contracts to have at least seven percent of their employees have a disability. “When you strip those…provisions away, what is left of [Section] 503, and what are they actually enforcing?” Anupa Iyer Geevarghese, a former deputy director of policy in the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contractor Compliance Programs, asked in July. “Anything that gives you a strong basis for enforcement is sort of whittled away.” According to the letter, “undue delays in investigating complaints of discrimination, abandonment of compliance reviews and stalled affirmative action plan monitoring call into question the agency’s commitment to enforcing protections for federal contract workers with disabilities.” “The agency is abandoning review of employment practices for 2,000 companies,” the letter continues, including “technology companies such as Google and Meta, airlines such as American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and consulting firms including Deloitte and Boston Consulting Group,” also noting that the Labor Department, apparently throughout Trump’s second term, “was not processing and investigating complaints.” The letter asks Chavez-DeRemer a series of questions, including how many disability discrimination complaints the office has received since January, how it has responded, and the impact of the delay on workers with disabilities. It requests a response by October 1—the first day of National Disability Employment Awareness Month.

On July 24, President Donald Trump issued an executive order for a nationwide push to involuntarily commit unhoused people to institutions—claiming that roundups would “restore public order,” and demanding the reversal of legal precedents and consent decrees that “impede” the policy, a draconian move that disability rights groups argue violates civil liberties. The resultant crackdown in Washington, DC—where an estimated 5,000 people live without permanent shelter, around 800 on the street—began on August 14. DC’s largest encampment was destroyed on Monday, and although it’s unclear how many people have been civilly committed, the sweep has left unhoused people scrambling to find new places to stay, often losing the few possessions they have. Dr. Sam Tsemberis, who developed the evidence-based Housing First approach Trump has abandoned, spoke to my Reveal colleagues last week about the futility and violence of the White House’s crackdown. “People will get discharged from the hospital. They will get released from the jail. And they’ll be back out on the street and the thing will be going in a circle again,” Tsemberis said. “The only way to end homelessness is to provide housing.” Trump has always backed brutal crackdowns on visible homelessness and disability, part of a lifelong pattern of hostility to poor people, disgust for disabled people, obsession with “good genes” and cleanliness, and a sense of Washington, DC—until fairly recently, a majority Black city—as a somehow fundamentally unsavory, unsightly place. His encampment sweeps and ramp-up of policing mirror familiar scenes in the San Francisco Bay Area, where an influx of wealth has sparked a major housing crisis, intense economic inequality, and public hostility towards the growing ranks of homeless locals. > “Disability has always functioned as a rationale, an alibi, an excuse, and a > bottom line for all kinds of oppression.” In fact, there’s a throughline from San Francisco to Trump’s anti-disability, anti-homeless agenda: as far back as 1867, San Francisco was the epicenter of a spate of “Ugly Laws,” a legislative crackdown on poverty and disability that closely parallels the Trump program on housing and institutionalization. Sparked in part by an influx of disabled Civil War veterans, ugly laws fined and enforced the arrest of poor, often disabled people for begging, or just existing, on city streets—often followed by institutionalization in brutal 19th-century facilities that offered little or nothing in the way of treatment. Ugly laws quickly spread across the country, and never entirely went away. Pushes to police, incarcerate, or drive out unhoused and disabled people have been a constant in American life—and hardly just a Republican thing, with high-profile Democratic politicians like California Gov. Gavin Newsom or New York Mayor Eric Adams prominently endorsing encampment sweeps and forced institutionalization. To understand more about the Ugly Laws and their legacy, I spoke with University of California, Berkeley professor emeritus Susan Schweik, who is also the author of the book The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. What societal issues contributed to the first Ugly Law in San Francisco in 1867? Let me first say that we know about this law because of the disability movement in the 1970s. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Helen Keller were never going to get arrested under this ordinance, which prohibited diseased, maimed, deformed bodies from exposing themselves to public view. It was a status offense. This law was directed against poor people. It’s extremely important to understand it as part of a big cluster of vagrancy laws that were being practiced in the South after the Civil War, and that US northern abolitionists who went down to fight slavery, unfortunately, saw the effectiveness of the vagrancy law in the South was being used to substitute for slavery. Abolitionists brought that back up to the cities in the north, which were under all kinds of pressure. People no longer knew the people they passed on the street. Streets were crowded. Poverty was extreme. There were no safety nets. So it targeted poor people. It targeted poor people who were begging, or who were understood to be begging and disability. Being disabled on the street at all could be construed as begging; whether you were putting a hand out or shaking a cup or saying anything to anyone, it was possible to be understood as asking for people’s pity. What types of punishments did poor, disabled people face under the Ugly Laws?  At some point, I realized that if I could figure out when a city opened its first almshouse or poor house, it was quite likely that the unsightly begging ordinance would happen, because they had a place to sweep people off the street. Once big medicalized institutions for the so-called feeble-minded [were established], then it’s easier for a city to pass a law like this without somehow feeling or seeming heartless. It’s very tied to institutionalization and to shutting people away. People were much more likely to be stuck behind those walls for good when it was understood that they were being kind of medically and charitably helped by being given a place. > “Trump, many decades ago, cut his political teeth by trying to shut down > vending stands by disabled veterans on Fifth Avenue.” Very often, the law was unenforced. The police were uncomfortable with it. They didn’t want to do it. A huge thing was sorting out the deserving and the undeserving, and so police often didn’t do it. Even if police did do it, very often, courts didn’t sentence anybody. There’s very little evidence that anybody actually was legally penalized at the level of the municipal courts. [But] that didn’t mean it didn’t have major catastrophic effects. I had thought for a long time that there was no record of resistance by disabled people to this oppression, and I was wrong. There was an amazing man who lived on the street named Arthur Franklin Fuller, who became the hero of my book, who traveled from town to town until he got kicked out. He self-published books, and one of them was like a legal treatise on the unconstitutionality of the unsightly beggar ordinances. I couldn’t believe it when I found it. It wasn’t like people didn’t try to organize. They did. There was an attempt to unionize disabled beggars in LA to negotiate with the city as a union. How did the “othering” of disabled people lead to the Ugly Laws not getting the backlash that it should have? I think the ugly laws were part of a variety of systems and structures, most notably institutionalization. They were tied to the development of various kinds of institutions that were eugenic because they very deliberately removed people from the social world where they might have relationships that might lead to childbearing. Discrimination in the US has always justified itself on disability grounds. The great historian Douglas Baynton makes this very clear in the realm of immigration: when groups are excluded from being able to enter the US, there’s always a language of disability. They’re contagious, they’re feeble-minded, they’re weak, they’re going to be a burden on the state. Disability has always functioned as a rationale, an alibi, an excuse and a bottom line for all kinds of oppression. Women couldn’t vote because they were hysterical and too emotional. Black people were too volatile or cognitively impaired, or whatever term was going to be marshaled at the moment. Donald Trump, many decades ago, cut his political teeth by trying to shut down vending stands by disabled veterans on Fifth Avenue, and he was absolutely explicit about them being repulsive and unsightly. He has a very long line of operating out of that terrorizing repulsion. Did the fight for disability civil rights help lead to the dismantling of the Ugly Laws?  There was a case in the 1970s in Omaha where a policeman wanted to arrest an unhoused person and didn’t know how—so he goes to the ordinance books, finds this [ugly] law, and he’s like, “Oh, that guy has a scar, so I’ll use this.” He goes to court. The judge was like, What does this mean? If my neighbor’s homely kids ask me for something, they should be arrested? Like, what? What is unsightly? Even though the judge threw it out of court, the DA held a press conference and said [it was] still a good law—and then it [was] reported as “Begging law punishes only the ugly.” Disability activists in Omaha read that headline, and working with disability activists in other Midwestern cities, decided that they were going to make a fuss about that law. An April 21, 1974 article from the Omaha World-Herald.Omaha World-Herald/Newspapers.com Chicago disability activists went to their city council as a form of [political] theater, and said this law is still on the books. Nobody was being arrested under it, [but] nobody had ever cared about removing it, and so poor Chicago got a bad rep for being the site of the ugly law, when it really was the site of the activism. So we know everything we know about these laws because of the disability movement in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. It was invoked explicitly in the campaign for the Americans with Disabilities Act. There are books all over the country, city code books, where they’re still sitting. Do you think that Trump’s executive order targeting homeless people with psychiatric disabilities is reminiscent of the Ugly Laws?  Two things that are conjoined in that executive order [are] endemic vagrancy and mental illness, the combination [that] the way in which these unsightly, bigger ordinances got passed after cities had institutions that could be stocked full of people who other people did not want to see on the street. How is endemic vagrancy and unsightly encampment and the presence of what gets called mental illness? How is it going to be tackled by the executive order? It’s going to be tackled by civil commitment, by institutionalization. I think about the important disability advocate and activist Rebecca Cokley, who put out this call and pointed out that people were tending to reduce the possible impact of that executive order to the realm of homelessness or unhoused people or mental health, but that potentially it had a much broader reach. It could target dissent, and that was true of the history of unsightly beggar ordinances. Someone trans could be identified as a mentally ill person. There are so many ways to contain and hurt and banish immigrants, especially Black and brown people, and to disappear them, as Rebecca says. Ugly laws basically disappeared after World War I, because the existence of large numbers of disabled veterans produced rehabilitation and systems that were, at least at in theory, meant to include people in every aspect of society. [But] here we are again. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

On Thursday, House Republicans voted to enact a spending bill that will strip close to one trillion dollars from federal Medicaid funding across a decade—an attack expected to cause tens of thousands of preventable deaths each year, disproportionately among the one in three disabled people on Medicaid in the US. The cuts will, among other reductions in treatment, limit Medicaid’s home and community based-services, endanger rural hospitals, and kick millions of users off Medicaid altogether, especially those unable to secure exemptions to the bill’s new work requirements. “It’s a devastating day for disabled people to witness members of Congress, people who are elected to serve the people, be willing to strip healthcare away from 17 million Americans,” said Maria Town, CEO and president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, “and endanger disabled people’s ability to live, work and thrive in our communities.” Republicans in Congress have played down or denied the impact of the cuts—which Town calls an out-and-out lie: “Many disabled people [whose insurance is] covered via Medicaid expansion…are going to lose access to their health care.” Nicole Jorwic, chief program officer at the nonprofit Caring Across Generations, is shocked that the bill’s open funding of tax cuts for the ultra-rich through gutting Medicaid still allowed it to pass. “That narrative was a clear one—taking care away from people to pay for tax cuts was an even stronger message than in 2017, when we did win” a fight against the rollback of the Affordable Care Act, she said. Little Lobbyists CEO Elena Hung, who has been fighting alongside other families in Washington, DC, to try and prevent the cuts, described the vote as a “punch in the gut.” “It’s just an absolute moral failure,” Hung said. “At the end of the day, this Congress lacks the courage to do the right thing.” For people like Hung, their kids’ future hangs in the balance. “Medicaid is the only way that children like mine are able to live at home and be in their communities and not be forced into a medical facility or institution,” Hung said. “It is literally lifesaving for children like mine.” Cuts to Medicaid are not the only devastating attack on the social safety net in the budget bill that just passed the House: It also includes $230 billion in cuts to SNAP over the next decade. “There are many disabled people who receive SNAP,” Town said. “In fact, I believe four out of all five households that receive SNAP benefits have a family member with a disability in them.” For the disability advocates I spoke with, Thursday was a difficult day without a clear plan for tomorrow. “While there is sure to be devastation and unfortunately, lives lost, and we need to be able to mourn for that,” Jorwic said, “what the disability community has always shown is that we can come together and imagine something that other people can’t see as possible.” “We have to have hope to continue to fight,” Hung said. “When I think about families like mine, families with kids with complex medical needs and disabilities, there isn’t a choice to give up.”

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners will be the first movie on a streaming platform that will also be available in Black American Sign Language at the time of its digital release when it hits HBO Max on the Fourth of July. “By amplifying Black Deaf voices and honoring the culture, identity, and history at the heart of this powerful film, Max’s ongoing commitment to accessibility builds off a growing ASL program,” reads a press release from Warner Bros Discovery, HBO Max’s parent company. Black American Sign Language is distinct from American Sign Language—and it developed because Black Deaf students were segregated in their own Black schools for the Deaf. Around eight percent of Deaf people in the US are Black, but not all have access to learning BASL due to ASL being more widely taught now. Franklin Jones, Jr., a lecturer in deaf studies at Boston University, has compared BASL to African American Vernacular English, describing it as: > Compared to those who use standard ASL, BASL signers are sometimes seen as > less animated, Jones says. There are fewer mouth movements (a feature known as > facial grammar) in BASL, for example. In other ways, though, it’s perhaps more > expressive. The sign space for BASL users tends to be higher, closer to the > forehead, and generally wider overall, whereas standard ASL tends to be > farther down and to rely on tighter, more economical choices. People fluent in > BASL also tend to use both hands for signs that might require only one in > standard ASL. Still, BASL is not a monolith. As with any language, there are > noticeable dialects and regional accents.  The film, set in 1932, follows two Black twin brothers, both played by Michael B. Jordan, who return to their hometown in Mississippi, when they have to face a supernatural force. The 1930s were definitely a time period where BASL was more common among Black Deaf people who had access to sign language education. Writer Ashley C. Ford remarked on BlueSky that she had once seen director Coogler sign with another person who he noticed was wearing hearing aids, though it is unclear whether Coogler speaks BASL, ASL or both. > When I met Ryan Coogler several years ago, we were standing in a group of > people chatting, when a woman with visible hearing aids walked up, and he > casually began to sign the whole conversation so she could participate. She > mouthed “thank you”. He nodded and just kept doing his thing. > > [image or embed] > > — Ashley C. Ford (@smashfizzle.bsky.social) June 30, 2025 at 2:38 PM “The release of SINNERS with BASL is a major step forward in accessibility, representation, and visibility in streaming,” the press release also noted.