Disability rights and disability policy are more prominent in this Democratic presidential primary than they have ever been, with several candidates releasing ambitious plans. Several of the plans have key pieces in common, such as fully funding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and ending the subminimum wage for people with disabilities, two pledges made by Sens. Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, as well as by Pete Buttigieg.
But while there’s been an overall advance in the attention paid this important issue, The New York Times reports that it’s Warren’s sweeping plan, and the process through which it was developed—involving a group of people with disabilities as advisers—that’s drawing the most enthusiasm from the disability community.
“It is the most comprehensive thing I have seen in my 20 years of looking at these things,” according to one person. “Long term, there are very few parts of this plan that wouldn’t improve my life,” another told The Times.
As with so many Warren plans, the disability plan draws together a vast range of policy, pulling together the threads in what might appear to be unrelated areas that actually affect people with disabilities. “All policy issues are disability policy issues,” she said in a recent Twitter question-and-answer session. The plan focuses in detail on financial independence, raising income and asset limits for qualifying for assistance such as in-home aides that are necessary for some people with disabilities to get to school or jobs. And like other Warren plans, the plan is intersectional, considering how disability and race can combine to produce specific challenges rarely considered by policy.
Disability advocates have raised one significant concern with Warren’s plan: its lack of a timeline for inclusive education ensuring that children with disabilities would be educated in regular classrooms. Buttigieg’s plan makes a more specific commitment on that front, for 85% of students with disabilities to be spending 80% of their time in a regular classroom by 2025.
As always, plans that will require passing Congress—most of them—will require taking back the Senate. But the Democratic presidential candidates are showing where they stand and what kind of a United States is possible.