Senate vote against disabled shows GOP 'nuttiness' is back

One month after the dawn of the Republican Party’s post-election self-inspection, it appears that they’re back to their wacky ways. 

The stunning rejection on Tuesday by GOP senators of a UN treaty to protect the rights of the disabled worldwide demonstrated a sharp right turn away from all the talk in November of a more moderate Republican Party.

Thirty-eight GOP senators blocked the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of Disabled People, which has already gained support in 138 countries. This is the sudden return of occasional Republican “nuttiness,” as RedState’s Erick Erickson has called it, with claims of secret UN motivations to harm disabled children.

On the left, some commentators took one look at the crackpot comments by former senator Rick Santorum (who publicly urged a “no” vote) and decided the U.S. had dodged a bullet – this guy could actually have become president. Santorum put forward a conspiracy theory about secret UN intentions and claimed that under the treaty his disabled daughter would have been put to death, cast aside as a useless human.

Santorum couldn’t seem to grasp that the CRDP pact is, in fact, an attempt to bring the rest of the world up to American standards.

Among those no doubt disappointed and embarrassed by the vote was Bob Dole, former senate majority leader and a partially disabled war veteran. Dole visited the Senate floor in a wheelchair, having been recently hospitalized, and reminded his former colleagues that the CRDP pact was one of his top priorities.

But Dole is from a bygone era when conservative Republicans remained pragmatic and practical on issues of this magnitude.

Tuesday’s Senate vote will give the U.S. a black eye around the world, as this report from Quartz, a website that covers international news, clearly shows:

“Here’s a lesson in America’s weird political institutions: How Christian conservatives lead the Republican Party to reject a treaty that endorsed existing American law.
“The US Senate voted (Tuesday) on ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Disabled People 61-38, but the majority fell short of the 66 votes needed for ratification. The 38 votes against came from Republican senators, most of whom signed a letter promising not to support the bill. The letter was organized by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, who said the treaty threatened U.S. sovereignty and could force the parents of disabled children to send them to public schools. It drew the support of home-schoolers who also fretted that the treaty was, among other things, a sly way to force America to adopt laws enshrining “abortion rights, homosexual rights, and demands (for) the complete disarmament of all people.”
“The last reference, obviously, is designed to scare American conservatives into believing that ratifying the treaty will empower the US government to take away their right to bear arms, enshrined in the American constitution. But the interpretation relies on the assumption that vague, utopian boilerplate about disarmament in an entirely different UN convention will somehow be applied if the U.S. ratifies the convention on disability. Nevertheless, this sort of stuff, promoted by evangelical politicians like former senator Rick Santorum, has a galvanizing effect on Republican politicians who live in fear of losing intra-party challenges from the right. It is the preserve of an isolationist wing of a party already deeply skeptical of international institutions generally.
“But aside from how overblown such fears are, the stranger fact is that the UN treaty is based on the Americans with Disabilities Act, enacted 22 years ago (under President George H.W. Bush), and if it were ratified, no US laws would have to change. It was … supported by prominent conservatives like Sen. John McCain and former Senate majority leader Bob Dole (both of whom, thanks to war wounds, are Americans with disabilities). The U.S. Chamber of Commerce supported the treaty, since it would help level the international playing field for American companies who already comply with the act, and potentially open foreign markets to U.S. disabilities technology.
“’It’s a treaty to change the world to be more like America,’” protested John Kerry, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”

There’s no word yet whether any black helicopters were seen circling the skies above the Capitol as the senators departed.