While Congress was locked up in debate over Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s proposed American Health Care Act, the Washington, D.C., jail was jam-packed with demonstrators determined to protect Medicaid.
Around 3 p.m. March 22, Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia officers arrested 54 disabled protesters at the Capitol Rotunda, but the mass arrest became a mere bullet point in the list of events leading up to the bill’s withdrawal from the House floor.
Disrupting tours in Washington, D.C., and getting escorted to jail was not enough to earn extensive media attention, and the protest subsided quietly. The minimal media coverage of disability-related protests, however, overlooks a group of people already marginalized in both the media and the political sphere. Nonviolent demonstrations have led to positive change for the disabled in the past, but media did not pay attention this time.
The hour-long protest and subsequent arrests took place only two days before the withdrawal of the Ryancare bill from the House. The 54 organizers from the disability activist group Americans Disabled Attendant Programs Today held a peaceful – if tour-halting – protest of proposed cuts to Medicaid. Their signs were less pacifistic and displayed life-or-death slogans, including “Medicaid = life for disabled.”
Clogging up the Capitol building violates a Washington, D.C., law that prohibits the obstruction of passages in public buildings – hence, the mass arrest and the $50 fines that protesters now must pay.
ADAPT demonstrations at the Capitol trace back to the early disability rights movement, most notably the Capitol occupation leading up to passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. On March 13, 1990, Capitol police made more than 100 arrests, following ADAPT’s effort to overcome the Bush administration’s hesitations about the ADA.
Early ADAPT protests in the 1980s found their forebears in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, taking their non-violent protests to buses and beyond. Formerly known as Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transit, ADAPT occupied public transit stations in an effort to secure physical accommodations for disabled commuters on city buses.
Protests are not a new undertaking for the organization, and they generally reoccur whenever Ryan attempts to slash Medicaid funding. ADAPT’s 2011 occupation of Capitol Hill, which included about 300 demonstrators, even reached Ryan’s offices before Capitol police escorted protesters out.
As these examples show, national ADAPT protests tend to be politically urgent, vocal, visible and arrest-heavy. Yet, disability-related demonstrations usually fail to reach the top-tier headlines, and neither mass arrests nor disrupted tours guarantee press coverage of a protest.
Disability is rarely a foregrounded issue in the news cycle, and in this case, most stories about the AHCA only obliquely address disability. The disabled population has been primarily identified as stakeholders, rather than a key party in the healthcare debate.
ADAPT may be controversial for violating the law and organizing unauthorized protests, but a $50 fine seems a small price to pay for political empowerment, reidentification as more than sidelined stakeholders – and most critically, Medicaid.
