On the recordMay 19, 2015
Listen, I had the same experience as you did, Mr. Schweikert. I was in the Longworth House Office Building a couple years back. You and I wrote a bill together to try to either delay or prevent the DOJ from putting this regulation into effect, and we had people literally protesting outside of our office, folks from the disability community who wanted this particular accommodation. And I am completely sympathetic to that. What I think they failed to see at the time and failed to grasp was, number one, they were already being accommodated. My guess is that 99.9 percent of the people who came to protest had never asked to use one of these portable lifts at hoteliers, so they were not aware of the fact that they were there but, at the same time, they never gave any thought to the unintended consequences of this particular piece of regulation that the DOJ promulgated. And I think that, again, is a lesson to be learned. A government that is big enough to give you everything that you want is big enough to take from you everything that you have. And this, in a very small way, is what we saw in the promulgation of this particular regulation.
