Tom Harkin: “I want to make clear that IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, is not a Federal mandate. The Senator…”

“I want to make clear that IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, is not a Federal mandate. The Senator from New Hampshire keeps talking about it as a Federal mandate. But saying it does not make it so. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is a civil rights bill. It is a bill that basically helps the States meet their constitutional obligation. In the early 1970s, there were two court cases in which the courts said that if a State chooses to fund public education, then children with disabilities enjoy a constitutional right to a free and appropriate public education. A State, if it wanted to, could say: We are not going to fund any public education, and they could do so. But if a State provides a free public education to its children, it cannot discriminate on the basis of race or sex or national origin. And as a result of these two cases that came up in the early 1970s, they cannot discriminate on the basis of disability, either.”