Epstein Victims Met with House Oversight Committee
"The oversight Dems, we're here,...
"We're pushing and using every tool that we have. And why this is important — it is about Epstein and it's about these survivors. But moreover, it is about an administration that refuses to tell the truth, that refuses to protect young girls. It is about an administration that wants you to look away."
~Rep. Lateefah Simon (D-CA)
“They want to exterminate us.”
Those were the blunt words of Steve Way—a long time disability rights activist—to describe Donald Trump and the GOP’s multi-front war targeting the disability community. Way—who was born with Muscular Dystrophy—explained that the GOP’s cutting $1 trillion dollars from Medicaid, gutting of the Department of Education and rolling back of protections for the disability community are all intended to make them “undesirable.” He added in a very matter of fact way, “They want to get rid of us,” that is why, “we need to call this for what it is: It's eugenics.”
Way is not being over the top. As the Center for American Progress detailed in a recent report, “History will show the first six months of the second Trump administration as an all-out war against disabled people.” The only reason this isn’t a bigger issue is because corporate media has all but ignored it.
We’ve never seen such a laser focused effort by an administration to undermine the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)—which just marked its 35th anniversary--that ensured every American could participate fully in society. As Rep. Lateefah Simon (D-Calif)--who is legally blind--explained to me, the Trump policies will at the very least lead to a more “segregated” society when it comes to those with disabilities.
One of the deadliest examples of Trump and GOP’s war on the disability community comes in the form of their heartless $1 trillion cut to Medicaid to fund a tax cut for their wealthy donors. Medicaid is a lifeline for more than 15 million Americans with disabilities--including 2.3 million children, 8 million working-age adults, and 4 million adults ages 65 and older.
As experts note, the GOP’s Medicaid cuts will inflict great pain on the disability community by reducing healthcare coverage, home health aides and more. Time recently explained, “These cuts translate into a forced retreat from independence, pushing individuals back into isolation and dependency, often in hospitals or costly, state-run institutions, directly contradicting the ADA's core tenets.”
Forcing disabled people into institutions as opposed to funding care for them to remain at home will literally kill people. That was the very point of Steve Way and other experts given that life expectancy in an institution is far lower than at home care. Yet that is what Trump and GOP knowingly voted to do.
That is not close to the end of Trump and GOP’s efforts to cruelly target the disability community. Trump’s gutting the Department of Education has undermined the guarantee that students with disabilities will be receiving free and appropriate public education. As Way noted, without the federal programs funded by the Department of Education, he would not have been talking to me that very day.
Rep. Simon raised that same issue. “I was one of those kids who needed the service provided by the federal government to ensure as a child in kindergarten that I had lessons to teach me to read braille,” she explained. But as Simon noted, by ending federal funding for these programs, there is simply no guarantee that individual states will have the funds needed to ensure other children will be provided these life changing services in the future.
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Other facets of the Trump/GOP’s despicable war on the disabled community include ending federal programs that support diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility programs also known as “DEIA.” Trump loves to drop the “A” from the full title to make it just “DEI” but the “A”—which stands for accessibility—has also been a GOP target. In fact, Trump took great pride when recently signing an executive order which mandates the elimination of all diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility programs throughout the federal government as well as federally funded programs outside the federal government.
Dean Obeidallah wrote a solid column on why the Trump Regime’s ableist policies are done with the goal of harming people with disabilities, similar to how Nazi Germany enacted punitive policies against people with disabilities.
A political action committee focused on electing out women and gender-nonconforming candidates has rescinded its endorsement of a queer East Bay House candidate due to her stance against gender-affirming care for youth
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