ADA Amendments Act of 2008

Based on Wikipedia: ADA Amendments Act of 2008

When the Courts Shrank Disability Rights, Congress Pushed Back

Here's a legal paradox that actually happened in America: a person could be too disabled to get a job, but not disabled enough to sue for discrimination. For nearly two decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act became law, federal courts kept narrowing who counted as "disabled" until the law protected almost no one it was designed to help.

Then, in 2008, something unusual occurred. Business lobbyists and disability rights advocates sat down together, hammered out a compromise, and convinced Congress to essentially tell the Supreme Court: you got it wrong.

The Original Promise

When Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, it borrowed its definition of "disability" from an older law—Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. That definition had seventeen years of case law behind it. Courts and lawyers understood how it worked. A disability was an impairment that "substantially limits one or more major life activities." Alternatively, you were protected if you had a record of such an impairment, or if people regarded you as having one.

The key word there is "substantially." What does that mean, exactly?

Under the Rehabilitation Act, courts treated the disability question as a preliminary hurdle—a threshold you crossed before getting to the real issue, which was whether discrimination actually happened. The focus stayed on the employer's conduct, not on parsing medical details about the employee's body.

But after the Americans with Disabilities Act passed, something shifted. Courts began spending enormous energy on a different question: does this person even count as disabled under the law?

The Supreme Court Closes the Door

Two Supreme Court decisions fundamentally changed who the Americans with Disabilities Act protected.

The first came in 1999. Karen Sutton and Kimberly Hinton were twin sisters who applied to be commercial pilots for United Airlines. Both had severe myopia—their uncorrected vision was around 20/200, which is legally blind. With glasses or contacts, though, they could see perfectly well. United rejected them because their uncorrected vision didn't meet the airline's standards.

The sisters sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act. They argued they were disabled—severely nearsighted—and United had discriminated against them based on that disability.

The Supreme Court disagreed. Writing for the majority, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said courts must consider disabilities in their "mitigated state." Because glasses corrected the sisters' vision, they weren't actually disabled. And since they weren't disabled, they couldn't sue for disability discrimination.

Think about the logic here. United Airlines wouldn't hire them because of their vision. But because they could correct their vision, they had no legal remedy for that decision.

The second case arrived in 2002. Ella Williams worked on an assembly line at a Toyota plant in Kentucky. She developed carpal tunnel syndrome and related conditions that made it painful and difficult to grip tools, perform repetitive motions, and lift objects. Toyota eventually fired her.

Williams sued, arguing her conditions substantially limited the major life activity of performing manual tasks. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against her. To be "substantially limited," the Court said, an impairment must prevent or severely restrict activities "that are of central importance to most people's daily lives"—things like household chores, bathing, and brushing your teeth. Being unable to perform specific job tasks wasn't enough.

The Court demanded that disabilities be "permanent or long-term" and that they severely restrict activities the average person performs daily. This was a high bar. An impairment that made it impossible to do your job but didn't prevent you from brushing your teeth? Not a disability under the law.

The Catch-22

Lower courts followed these precedents enthusiastically. And that's when the real absurdity emerged.

Person after person came to court alleging disability discrimination. And case after case got thrown out—not because discrimination hadn't occurred, but because the court decided the plaintiff wasn't disabled enough to be protected.

People with amputations. People with epilepsy. People with multiple sclerosis. People with diabetes. People with muscular dystrophy. People with cancer. People living with HIV. People with intellectual disabilities. Courts ruled that all of these conditions, in various cases, didn't qualify as disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The paradox was especially cruel for people who managed their conditions well. If you took medication that controlled your epilepsy, you weren't disabled—your condition was "mitigated." If your prosthetic leg worked well, you weren't disabled. But employers could still refuse to hire you because of these very conditions. You just couldn't do anything about it.

By the mid-2000s, the Americans with Disabilities Act had become a law that protected a vanishingly small category of people—those disabled enough to prove they couldn't perform daily activities, but not so disabled that they couldn't work at all.

The Report That Changed Everything

In 2004, the National Council on Disability published a report with a pointed title: "Righting the ADA."

The National Council on Disability is an independent federal agency. Its job is advising the President and Congress on disability policy. And its report was blunt: the courts had completely misread what Congress intended when it passed the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The report catalogued decision after decision where courts had excluded people Congress clearly meant to protect. It identified the narrowing of "disability" as the central problem. And it proposed specific legislative language to fix it.

This report became a roadmap for what came next.

Strange Bedfellows

In September 2006, on literally the last working day of the congressional session, two unlikely allies introduced a bill called the "ADA Restoration Act." Representative Jim Sensenbrenner was a conservative Republican from Wisconsin who chaired the House Judiciary Committee. Steny Hoyer was a Maryland Democrat who would soon become House Majority Leader. They agreed on almost nothing—except that the Supreme Court had broken disability rights law and Congress needed to fix it.

Their bill died in committee. But it planted a flag.

The following July, on the seventeenth anniversary of the original Americans with Disabilities Act, Hoyer and Sensenbrenner tried again. This time they had Senate partners: Democrat Tom Harkin of Iowa and Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. The new bill launched with 143 co-sponsors in the House—an impressive show of bipartisan support.

But the business community pushed back hard. The United States Chamber of Commerce and other industry groups lobbied against the bill. So did the Justice Department under President George W. Bush. Employers worried that broadening the definition of disability would expose them to more lawsuits and require them to provide more accommodations.

Congressional leaders faced a choice. They could try to muscle the bill through on a party-line vote. Or they could bring business groups to the table and find a compromise everyone could live with.

They chose negotiation.

The Negotiation

On February 19, 2008, representatives from the disability rights community and the business community sat down together in Washington. The disability side included advocates from the American Association of People with Disabilities, the National Council on Independent Living, the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, and the Epilepsy Foundation. The business side brought the Chamber of Commerce, the Society for Human Resource Management, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the HR Policy Association.

Before they started, everyone signed a document. Whatever agreement they reached, they all pledged to defend it through the entire legislative process. No side deals. No defections. If they couldn't agree, the deal was off.

For the next three months, they met almost every week. Each side checked regularly with a broader coalition of allies. The disability negotiators consulted dozens of advocacy organizations. The business negotiators consulted employers and human resources professionals across industries.

On May 13, 2008, they reached a deal.

What the Law Changed

The ADA Amendments Act—note the name change from "Restoration Act" to "Amendments Act," a diplomatic gesture toward compromise—became law on September 25, 2008. It took effect on January 1, 2009. And it systematically dismantled the framework the Supreme Court had built.

First, the law deleted two findings from the original Americans with Disabilities Act that the Supreme Court had used to limit its scope. The original law said "some 43,000,000 Americans have one or more physical or mental disabilities" and described disabled people as "a discrete and insular minority." Courts had interpreted these statements as caps—if only 43 million people were disabled, then the definition must be narrow enough to include only that many.

Gone.

Second, the law explicitly told courts how to interpret the word "disability": broadly. The Amendments Act states that the definition "shall be construed in favor of broad coverage of individuals under this Act, to the maximum extent permitted." It directly criticized the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's old regulations as "overly strict."

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the law overturned the "mitigating measures" doctrine from the Sutton case. Courts can no longer consider medication, prosthetics, hearing aids, mobility devices, assistive technology, reasonable accommodations, or behavioral modifications when deciding whether someone has a disability. If your underlying condition substantially limits a major life activity, you're protected—even if treatment controls that condition.

This means the Sutton twins, with their severe uncorrected myopia, would now be considered disabled under the law. So would a diabetic who manages their blood sugar with insulin. So would an epileptic whose medication prevents seizures.

Fourth, the law addressed episodic conditions. Many disabilities come and go—multiple sclerosis flares, cancer goes into remission, depression lifts and returns. The Amendments Act says these conditions must be evaluated in their active state. You don't lose protection just because you're having a good month.

Fifth, the law defined "major life activities" with actual examples, rather than leaving courts to guess. The list includes caring for oneself, performing manual tasks, seeing, hearing, eating, sleeping, walking, standing, lifting, bending, speaking, breathing, learning, reading, concentrating, thinking, communicating, and working. It also covers major bodily functions: the immune system, digestion, bowel and bladder function, neurological function, brain function, respiration, circulation, the endocrine system, and reproduction.

That last category is significant. Under the old interpretation, you might have a medical condition affecting your kidneys or your immune system, but if you could still brush your teeth and do household chores, you weren't disabled. Now, if your condition substantially limits a major bodily function, you're protected.

The "Regarded As" Revolution

The Americans with Disabilities Act always had three ways to qualify as disabled: having an impairment that substantially limits major life activities, having a record of such an impairment, or being "regarded as" having one.

That third category matters because discrimination is often about perception, not reality. An employer who refuses to hire someone because they think that person is HIV-positive has discriminated based on disability—even if the person isn't actually HIV-positive.

But the Supreme Court had imposed a high bar on "regarded as" claims too. You had to show not just that the employer perceived you as impaired, but that they perceived your impairment as substantially limiting a major life activity in a way that was substantial.

Try parsing that in court.

The Amendments Act simplified things dramatically. Now you just need to show that you were subjected to discrimination because of an actual or perceived physical or mental impairment. You don't have to prove the employer thought your impairment was "substantial." You just have to prove they acted against you because of it.

There's one limitation: if you qualify as disabled only under the "regarded as" category, employers don't have to provide you with accommodations. They just can't discriminate against you. This was part of the compromise with business groups, who worried about unlimited accommodation obligations.

The Politics of Disability

What made the ADA Amendments Act unusual wasn't just its substance—it was its process.

Congress essentially said to the Supreme Court: you misunderstood what we meant, and we're going to fix that. This happens less often than you might think. When the Court interprets a statute, Congress can always revise that statute—in theory. In practice, legislative gridlock usually prevents it. Controversial court decisions become the permanent law of the land simply because Congress can't agree on alternatives.

The Amendments Act broke that pattern. A bipartisan group of legislators, backed by an unusual coalition of disability advocates and business interests, pushed through a law that explicitly rejected Supreme Court precedent.

The vote wasn't even close. The House passed it 402 to 17. The Senate passed it by unanimous consent—meaning not a single senator objected enough to demand a recorded vote. President Bush, whose Justice Department had initially opposed the bill, signed it without hesitation.

How did this happen?

Part of the answer is that disability rights has historically been a bipartisan issue. The original Americans with Disabilities Act passed under President George H.W. Bush with overwhelming support from both parties. Many of the law's strongest champions—like Bob Dole, who lost the use of his right arm in World War II—were Republicans.

Part of the answer is strategic. By bringing business groups into the negotiation, the bill's sponsors neutralized the opposition that had killed earlier versions. The Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and major HR organizations all endorsed the final bill. That left no organized constituency opposing it.

And part of the answer is that the Supreme Court's decisions had created such obviously absurd results that almost everyone agreed something had gone wrong. When courts rule that people with cancer, amputation, and epilepsy aren't disabled enough for disability law to protect them, the law has lost touch with its purpose.

The Limits of the Fix

The ADA Amendments Act addressed one specific problem: the narrowing of who counts as disabled. It did not address other issues with disability law.

For instance, the law still requires employees to be "qualified individuals"—able to perform the essential functions of a job with or without reasonable accommodation. Employers and employees still fight about what counts as "essential" and what counts as "reasonable."

The law still allows employers to reject applicants or fire employees who pose a "direct threat" to workplace safety. Courts still have to decide when a disability actually makes someone dangerous and when employers are just assuming it does.

And the law is still enforced primarily through private lawsuits—which means people who experience discrimination need lawyers, time, and money to pursue their claims. Many never do.

But on the threshold question of who the Americans with Disabilities Act protects, the 2008 Amendments worked exactly as intended. Courts now spend far less time litigating whether plaintiffs are "really" disabled and far more time examining whether discrimination actually occurred.

What It Means Today

If you've noticed more people in recent years claiming disabilities—in workplaces, in schools, in public accommodations—the ADA Amendments Act is part of that story.

The law didn't create new disabilities. It didn't lower medical standards or encourage people to fake conditions. What it did was restore the original promise of the Americans with Disabilities Act: that people with physical and mental impairments deserve protection from discrimination, and that courts shouldn't spend their energy trying to shrink that category.

A student with attention-deficit disorder who takes medication that helps them focus? Still disabled under the law, because you don't count the medication. An employee whose anxiety disorder is managed through therapy? Still disabled, because treatment doesn't erase the underlying condition. A worker with diabetes, multiple sclerosis, or epilepsy? Protected, even if their condition is well-controlled.

This was always what Congress intended. It just took two decades, several bad court decisions, and an unusual coalition of advocates to make it stick.

The courts, for their part, have followed the new rules. In 2009, the D.C. Circuit held that the Amendments Act doesn't apply retroactively—meaning people whose cases were already in the pipeline didn't benefit. But for everyone since January 1, 2009, the broader definition applies.

The question of who counts as "disabled" hasn't disappeared from American law or American life. If anything, it's become more contested as more conditions get recognized and more people seek accommodations. But the legal framework now tilts toward inclusion rather than exclusion. The burden has shifted from plaintiffs proving they're disabled enough to employers proving they didn't discriminate.

That shift matters. It's the difference between a law that protects people and a law that protects the idea of protecting people while letting almost no one through the door.