Paper Money and the Blind - Another Congressional Sightless Oversight
By Marion Edwyn Harrison (01/19/07)
Congressional staffs have grown immensely - one might opine, counterproductively - large. A Congressional committee or subcommittee upon almost any day is conducting some kind of "oversight" hearing or investigation. We now have an example of rather sightless oversight.
We seldom comment upon pending litigation. However, a recent Opinion of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia merits comment. The Opinion exemplifies that which the media has ignored in reporting - namely, the underlying fact that Congress has goofed by ignoring the obvious. After all, what could be more obvious than the fact that our United States Federal Reserves Notes - that is, paper money - are all the same size and texture, rendering it difficult or impossible for a blind or sight-impaired individual to distinguish one from another. (Indeed, because they also are all the same color, configuration and texture, the best eyesight must look carefully quickly to distinguish one from another - usually by the picture.)
The case is American Council of the Blind et al v Henry M. Paulson, Jr. (sued in his official capacity as Secretary of the Treasury, to which the Bureau of Engraving and Printing reports, not in his personal capacity - a pleading requirement). Judge James Robertson objectively and thoroughly analyzes the law and rules that “ . . . the Treasury Department’s failure to design, produce and issue paper currency that is readily distinguishable to blind and visually impaired individuals violates § 504 of the Rehabilitation Act . . .” Indeed, relevant legislative history begins in 1973 and Congress erratically since – 1979, 1981, 1983, 1991 - has dabbled around with legislation involving problems of sightless people involving paper money.
What is more obvious, especially to anybody who has traveled in any of the 180 countries which circulate paper bills readily distinguishable from each other, that our United States paper money, unlike that of other countries, is all the same color, size, texture?
Judge Robertson has found “ . . . that the Department of the Treasury [violates the law] by its repeated and continuing failures to design and issue paper currency that is readily distinguishable to blind and visually impaired people . . .”
This finding appears based solidly upon fact and law. The decision undoubtedly will be appealed. If the decision is held to have erred, the Treasury and its Bureau of Engraving and Printing, but not Congress, may be off the hook. The threshold fact is that Congress never specifically pinpointed paper money in its legislation and reports purporting to confer benefits upon sightless folk but arguably swept up paper money into other “feel - good” legislation designed to help the blind. The Treasury offered, and doubtless will persist in advocating, an argument about economic independence in its printing of paper money.
Regardless of the final outcome of the case (which surely reads as though correctly decided), Congress needs to apply some realistic oversight. It is a bit of a sham to enact legislation purporting to benefit the blind while overlooking a phenomenon as obvious as the sameness of our dollar bills. The much repeated concept of “oversight” should include the physical act of seeing as well as various public-relations applications of the noun.
Marion Edwyn Harrison is President of, and Counsel to, the Free Congress Foundation.
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