Kansas senators Pat Roberts and Jerry Moran voted against an international treaty modeled on the Americans With Disabilities Act Tuesday. They were two of the five votes needed to ratify the treaty which Kansan Bob Dole came, with great difficulty, to support. Dole came to the Senate in a wheelchair pushed by his wife, Elizabeth. The two left the well of the Senate before the final vote was taken. THE U.S. SENATE will be given another opportunity to join the rest of the world in celebrating the compassion and practicality of the Americans With Disabilities Act by ratifying the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. When that day comes, Kansans should let Roberts and Moran know that Kansan Bob Dole is right, that they should join his cause and help erase the black mark their vote placed on our state’s reputation this Tuesday.
Sen. Moran’s vote was particularly difficult to understand. Earlier in the year he had joined Sen. John McCain of Arizona in a press release supporting ratification. Tuesday he voted no. It was apparent that Republican leadership had cracked the whip.
The 38 Republicans who voted against ratification — which requires a two-thirds majority — said they feared ratification would violate U.S. sovereignty and give United Nations bureaucrats the power to take disabled U.S. children away from their parents if they were not being treated as the treaty required. Supporters of the convention said that this fear was completely unfounded.
Common sense would tell you that the Republican argument is preposterous. It is beyond imagination that the most powerful nation on earth would be unable to prevent a U.N. nanny from snatching a crippled child away from her Iola parents. The Republican argument, made most vehemently by ex-senator, ex-presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, is yet another example of Republican extremism that turns off voters in both parties.
The Americans With Disabilities Act has done a great deal to make life easier for America’s disabled citizens since it became law in 1990. It also made the United States a world leader in defending the rights of the disabled. Its passage was one of the crowning achievements of President H. W. Bush. The U.N. treaty that Republicans rejected Tuesday is an effort to take America’s compassionate approach as a model for the world.
Sen. Dole, as every Kansan should know, used his power and prestige as majority leader and his own triumph over his war wounds to push the bill through the Senate, where it enjoyed broad, bipartisan support.
The treaty has been ratified by 125 countries. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved it last July in a bipartisan vote, 13-6. At the same time, the committee passed a resolution stating that the U.S. would surrender none of its sovereign authority by joining those 125 nations. The committee said U.S. ratification would not give the U.N. any power to “alter or overrule United States law” and added that any recommendations that the U.N. might make under the convention would not be binding on state or federal governments or in any state or federal government.
What the convention would do was encourage other nations to come up to U.S. standards — the international gold standard for treatment of those with disabilities.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
