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| Ex-Senate Leader Bob Dole watches from his wheel chair as the Senate votes down the UN Treaty on Disabled Access |
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There was a vote in the Senate to approve a UN Treaty. A UN Treaty that would work to make more countries inclusive of the same rights of disabled that the US first enshrined in the American With Disabilities Act... It needed a 2/3s majority to pass.
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So yes, this was enshrining, as a UN goal, a United States law - passed in the US in a bi-partisan manner. What could possible go wrong?
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The UN Treaty had been signed by President Bush the Younger and by President Obama, but the Senate needs to ratify any treaty. It failed. Voting yes were all the Democratic Votes as well as 8 Republican Senators (including John McCain). Bob Dole - no longer in the Senate - came to speak in support of it. Both Senator Dole and Senator McCain were disabled due to war injuries. They wanted those same rights pushed for world wide.
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Niether they, nor the fact that this was based on a US law impressed the master class minds of the Republican Party.
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Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) saw it as a threat to home schooled students in Salt Lake City. Because, if a disabled vet had the right in Moscow to get into the Legislature, then (I guess) commies are in Provo next make kids go to school. And ex-Senator Rick Santorum saw it as some sort of new international abortion loophole. Crazy Uncle Rick tends to see everything as some bizarre international abortion loophole. His fixation on this, and on gay sex, are a few of the reasons he lost his Senatorial Seat in Pennsylvania by 20+ percentage points - but apparently he wandered into the Senate to rant and no one remember he hasn't been elected to it in the last few elections. So they let crazy man pontificat for a while.
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Now, if you can shoe-horn those two crazy ideas into a disabilities act, you can probably shoe-horn them into any argument at all. "Hell no, we can't cancel those tank orders - what if North Korea tries to stop Home Schooling for Suzzie Didn't anyone see Red Dawn?!" Okay, if that is the case then fucking go home and let American stop paying you all to pretend to work.
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At the very least let us stop paying for your offices and staff and library that you obviously never use. Hell we can just install your vote button in Rush Limbaugh's Radio booth and be done with it. I don't mind if it saves us a little money. You can just FAX in your "Fillibuster" from your throne on the shitter, when you want to make your next big political point.