Exactly What Congress Intended?

Abstract

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed by Congress and signed into law in 1990 with tremendous bipartisan support and high hopes. When President George H.W. Bush signed it, he called the law a "sledgehammer" to shatter a "shameful wall of exclusion". Unfortunately, for many people with disabilities experiencing discrimination on the job, the ADA turned out to be more of a rubber mallet. The Supreme Court, in a series of decisions in 1999 and 2002, gutted the ADA by narrowly interpreting its definition of "disability". In 2008, Congress fired back by passing the ADA Amendments Act of 2008. This Article discusses the Congress-courts dialectic surrounding the ADA: from its passage in 1990, to the pit of Supreme Court jurisprudence, to the advocacy effort that swung the pendulum back to Congress. While judicial interpretations of the Amendments are just beginning to surface, they are, for the most part, exactly what Congress intended.

Keywords: ADA Amendments Act, ADA, disability, statutory interpretation