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Disability Scoop (6/22/26)

This week on CounterSpin: A former UK Prime Minister famously sniffed:

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand, “I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!” Or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the government must house me!” And so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women, and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people, and people look to themselves first.

That idea, from Margaret Thatcher, seems important to keep in mind as we watch corporate news reporters whistle past a directive from the Trump administration’s Department of Justice that says: That whole thing about policies encouraging disabled people to be able to live in community, with family, with friends—yeahh, you don’t need to do that. You can just lock ’em up.

Why are establishment news reporters uninterested in this memo from the Office of Legal Counsel that says that no laws “require states to treat mentally disabled patients in the most integrated setting appropriate to their needs”? The memo, as folks like those at Disability Scoop remind us, does not alter current law, but could impact how federal agencies enforce it.  But is that the reason that elite media don’t care? Or are disabled people, their lives, their possibilities, just off the screen? When states start forcing folks into institutions because they’ve been told they don’t need to provide services, will it be a story then? And what kind of story will that be?

We talk about it with Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress.

Featured image from Getty/Barbara Alper via the Disibility Justice Initiative.