Accommodating Senator Fetterman
what "reasonable" accommodations are...and aren't
When I was saving up to move to New England and go to school, I worked as a nanny for almost a year. My charge, a bright little girl named Danielle, was two years old during most of that year. I went through many important developmental changes with her, potty-trained her, and helped her learn to love books.
During my time as her nanny, she went through what parents call “the terrible twos,” where “no” was her favorite word. Her newly discovered ability to express her will became something she reveled in doing at every opportunity.
This is normal and healthy. It’s also frustrating as hell.
The frustration this developmental phase presents is why parents, nannies, and others have a go-to tactic for managing this time in a toddler’s life. It doesn’t work perfectly or all the time, but it works more often than it doesn’t.
Simply offer the child choices. The child doesn’t get to decide whether to wear pajamas to bed, but he or she can decide between the ones printed with monkeys or the ones printed with planets and rockets. The child doesn’t get a choice about lying down at naptime, but he or she can choose which stuffed animal or book to play with quietly, if they don’t want to close their eyes.
The most recent news cycle about Senator Fetterman (PA), wherein the US Senate abandoned years of tradition to relax its dress code—allowing him to wear gym shorts and hoodies on the Senate floor—reminded me sharply of my time caring for Danielle.
She spent months wanting to wear only yellow or blue, and her parents, understandably, refused to buy an entire child’s wardrobe in those colors for a fast-growing toddler. I did my best to stay on top of the laundry, but sometimes her favorites weren’t available and the choice between two non-favorites wasn’t what she wanted. This led to many conversations like this:
Me: “Sweetheart, I know you want to wear yellow, but your yellow shirts are all in the wash right now. You can wear this purple shirt or this red shirt. Which do you choose?”
Danielle: “YELLOW!!! WANT YELLOW!”
Me: “Danielle honey, you can’t have yellow right now. You can have purple or red.”
Danielle: (looks confused, is near tears).
Me: “You choose to wear purple or red, and we’ll watch Elmo while we wait for the laundry to finish. How’s that?”
(We were going to watch Elmo anyway.)
Negotiating in this way—giving her choices, allowing her to feel that she had autonomy—worked more often than it didn’t to keep her calm and interacting in a reasonable way. The experience of using her words and having them actually matter to the grown-up caring for her, having her words result in a tangible reality, was a crucial part of her development at this time in her life. It caused her to gain self-esteem, feeling that she was important and her desires mattered, and taught her how to recognize and express her desires and needs.
What it also was, of course, was an adult managing a toddler—with a toddler’s extremely limited capacity for distress tolerance, emotional control, and not getting what she wants.
This is an appropriate way to manage a toddler. It will have to change as the child gains cognitive capacity, lest it turn into a manipulation—a case of the child consciously using the possibility of throwing a fit to get what they want. Most children develop the cognitive capacity for that sort of plotting somewhere around age three and a half, at which point parents and nannies have to be much more careful with this tactic.
But for very young children, this is a healthy tactic of interaction—it creates many opportunities for attunement between caregiver and child, modeling of respectful interaction, and allowing the child to learn to assert autonomy over his/her own body (which is important for many reasons, including as a safeguard against abuse).
It is beyond appalling as a way to manage a US senator, too farcical to work as a movie plot, but this appears to be where we are.
Ah, 2023. Who knew?
Senator Fetterman’s Fitness for Office
Senator Fetterman is being cited as the reason for the Senate’s change of dress code. The change only applies to Senators, not staffers, and Fetterman has famously gone to great lengths to avoid wearing suits, including standing just off the Senate floor and casting votes with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.
Fetterman was treated for severe depression not long after his election, a mental health crisis following a physical health one—he had a stroke, which left him with serious difficulties—while running for office. His staff insisted then, and to my knowledge have never changed their story, that it’s merely a processing difficulty, not a cognitive one. They maintain that he can understand language presented to him via closed captioning just fine. The truth of this assertion is highly debatable, as Fetterman’s performance in live debates (four minute clip here) demonstrates. After the fact, and despite a rehearsal with the professional captioning company who handled the debate, Fetterman claimed that his difficulty was related to problems with the captioning. The company denied this.
As Stephen L. Miller wrote in the Spectator, the dress code isn’t the most important issue. It’s the question of Fetterman’s fitness for office. “Now we’re being told that if John Fetterman is not allowed to wear whatever clothes he chooses, it could trigger a remission of his depression and hamper any further recovery from his stroke….When do we stop accommodating John Fetterman’s lies about the severity of his condition, all while being told by medical staff that he requires no special treatment?”
The assertion that requiring Fetterman to abide by the traditional dress code is “ableist” goes hand in hand with all the positive media attention he has received for bringing awareness and representation to Americans with disabilities, particularly those who may wish to serve in politics. (Example stories here and here.)
What is Ableism?
Ableism, in my view, is a type of prejudice that prizes a state of normal health and/or capacity over a state of disability when the disability in question can be reasonably accommodated such that it does not result in a lack of ability to perform the job or task under consideration. If the disability in question does in fact result in a lack of ability to perform the job or task under consideration, then recognizing this fact is not ableism. It’s adulthood.
A few examples of what is and is not ableism.
Ableist: hiring a coder who does not use a wheelchair over an equally qualified coder who does use a wheelchair.
Not Ableist: regarding candidates in wheelchairs as having a lack of capacity to work as mail carriers in a rural area that requires going up and down steep driveways to deliver packages.
Ableist: not hiring a type 1 diabetic as a delivery driver because of their diabetes.
Not Ableist: requiring a type 1 diabetic who is going to drive on your payroll and covered by your insurance to check their blood sugar an agreed-upon number of times during the day and correct it if it’s too high or too low.
Ableist: not considering me, a deaf person who uses hearing aids (more on that in a moment), for a job editing your Substack since you would be annoyed by having to text me before all phone calls to say “Hey, I’m going to call you in a few minutes so please turn on your hearing aids.”
Not Ableist: not considering me, a deaf person who uses hearing aids, for a job doing sound effects editing for your podcast—or any other job that requires the ability to make fine sound-distinctions based on what people with normal hearing will hear.
On Reasonable Accommodations
Many people don’t have any experience of needing, requesting, or receiving reasonable accommodations. I do, so here’s an explanation that will, I hope, be helpful.
I am deaf. Many people hear “deaf” and think that it means “what’s a sound?” In our technological age of powerful hearing aids and cochlear implants, this is almost never what “deaf” actually means. In my case, it means that I am hard-of-hearing to the point that I require technological help to use the phone. This the usual standard that people with hearing loss use to differentiate between hard-of-hearing and deaf. Thus, I use the word “deaf” to describe my state of hearing.
With hearing aids, I am able to use the phone and participate in most conversations. The key word there is “most.” I struggle mightily with accents and when more than one person is talking. I use the auto-captioning feature on Microsoft Teams to get written records of important work calls. I use captioning on all TV shows, movies, etc., that I watch, read lyrics to all new music, and otherwise use a mixture of accommodations to help me anytime I need to take in new information by ear.
I also live with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a consequence of experiencing child abuse when I was a child and having been raped as an adult. I have, at times, required accommodation for both these disabilities.
The Americans with Disabilities Act requires schools, government, and most businesses and employers to provide reasonable accommodation to disabled people. This is right and just. Further, it enables people like me to earn money and pay taxes, rather than go on the dole and collect disability benefits, so it benefits everyone.
A reasonable accommodation is one that allows the disabled person a fair chance at performing as well as a peer without that disability.
As an undergraduate, I received disability accommodations for my anxiety disorder (PTSD) and for my deafness. I was offered many more accommodations than I accepted (which is another essay; perhaps I’ll write it if there’s interest). Here are the ones I accepted, and why they were reasonable.
Peer Notes. My university had a system whereby students who were good note-takers could get community service credit for uploading their notes to a special portal. Students with an accommodation to receive peer notes could then access those notes. This was a reasonable accommodation because my hearing often meant that I missed things or misunderstood things. As a mathematics major, most of my classes were taught in the most difficult way possible for a student with limited hearing: with the professor’s back to the class, while writing on the board. Peer notes let me focus all my energy on listening, knowing that if I missed something, I would get it from the peer notes. This meant that when I wasn’t sure if the professor had said “15” or “50,” or when I wasn’t sure if I had heard “secant” or “cosecant,” I could relax and continue listening, knowing that the peer notes would be available to supplement my own. This accommodation let me have the same level of access to the lecture as a student with normal hearing.
Preferred Seating. This accommodation allowed me to choose my seat in every class and required the professor to make any adjustments required to enable me to keep that seat. The reason I needed this accommodation is that at the time I was unable to sit with my back to the door of any room. (With hard work in therapy, my PTSD continues to get better, including in this respect.) There were some classrooms with all student seating in positions where the students’ backs were always to the door. When this happened, I would sometimes move a desk so that I could see both the professor and the back door. Other times, I would sit in the back row on the very end and angle my desk slightly so that I had an easy view of the door. This enabled me to participate because I was not overcome with anxiety and adrenaline from being unable to tell who was entering the room and why/how I could escape if needed. It also freed the professor from having to try to “take care of” me in any sense; I decided where I would sit and all he or she had to do was accommodate my decision (generally requiring them to do nothing at all). This accommodation let me eliminate something that would have caused an ongoing, serious impediment to paying attention in class.
Extra Time. I almost never used this accommodation, but when I needed it, I really needed it, so I always kept it on my record. One example of a time when I really needed it? A drunk man accosted me on the city bus, put his hands on me, and threatened to kill me, on my way to take my Calculus 2 final exam. I arrived in a state of full PTSD triggering. “Triggering” here is not used in the colloquial sense of being made mildly uncomfortable. PTSD triggering means that even though my adult brain understood that I was on campus taking a final exam, my nervous system thought that I was seven or eight years old and had just been roughed up and threatened by my father again. I was full of adrenaline, with the taste of metal in my mouth and my heart rate 50% higher than normal. In that state, I was supposed to sit down and do trigonometric substitution integrals that required thirty steps to complete, to remember which convergence test to use for which sequence, and do all the rest of what Calculus 2 requires. The extra time accommodation let me sit there and spend the first half hour just breathing, trying to calm myself, and using techniques I learned in therapy to try to return to my baseline. I then took the test one problem at a time, taking short breaks after each problem. As a result of this accommodation, I had a fair shot at PTSD not affecting my performance.
Use of the Testing Center. My university maintained a testing center for students who received disability accommodations. The staff there were fully cognizant on each student’s accommodations. When I arrived, a testing station (with a chair that would not place my back to the door and provided a clear view of a clock) was ready for me. The staff would also connect with me and we’d plan my breaks, if I intended to use them, and anything else I may need to access my accommodations at that time. This was more for the professors than the students, freeing them from having to directly provide the accommodations themselves, but it was a good situation to take tests in and I often used it. This accommodation was more a matter of convenience for me and my professors than anything else, but it also ensured I never had to spend time and energy advocating for my accommodations; they were in place by default.
What Would Be “Reasonable Accommodations” for a US Senator?
Being a United States Senator is a very big deal. It’s the most exclusive club in the world, with only 100 members at a time. Doing the job of US Senator requires the ability to understand and respond to language in real time, read and understand legislation, juggle multiple priorities, manage a high level of stress (including the stress of being famous), and to do so in a civil, dignified manner befitting a representative of both the United States of America and one of its fifty great states.
We were told during the campaign that, despite having suffered a stroke, Senator Fetterman actually could understand and respond to language, but simply required it in a different form—via closed captioning. If this (highly debatable) claim were true, then providing closed captioning for him would be a reasonable accommodation. (More reasonable than it used to be, as there are some astonishing technological solutions available now.)
If a deaf person were to get elected Senator, providing him or her with an ASL interpreter would be a reasonable accommodation. If a blind person were to get elected Senator, installing special software that reads text to the blind person, as well as making adjustments to office access (to enable him or her to have a private place to hear sensitive information) would all be reasonable accommodations.
What about mental health difficulties, such as Fetterman’s depression? While I personally would advise someone with major depression not to run for Senate, as stress can exacerbate depression and make it much more difficult to manage, that doesn’t mean that people with depression are incapable of serving as Senators.
If someone with serious depression is a serving US Senator, there are many possible examples of reasonable accommodations. Installing full-spectrum lighting in his or her office comes to mind. It would also be appropriate to permit him or her to request breaks in situations where the Senate is in session for long hours. Likewise, if the Senator was treating their depression with talk therapy, expediting the paperwork to get his/her therapist a security clearance would be a good accommodation—so the Senator could continue to benefit from the “you can talk about everything here” aspect of therapy.
Coddling is Not Accommodation
Accommodating Fetterman by permitting him to dress for the gym on the Senate floor is not reasonable. It’s infantilizing. It’s degrading. And it smacks of manipulation on Fetterman’s part, a type of fit-throwing to bring himself attention, comfort, and a way to make himself special.
Fetterman, in my opinion, confirmed the “manipulative child” scenario as the reality when he tweeted this:
Senator Fetterman is not a toddler, and managing him as one is beneath the dignity of the United States Senate.
Shame on everyone who was involved in changing the dress code.
Shame on everyone who dares call it ableism to require an adult with depression to act like an adult.
Shame on all of us, for putting up with this abominable, degrading state of affairs in our government.
This was an expanded and updated version of an essay I wrote in October 2022, after the Fetterman/Oz debate.
About Me and My Substack: I’m a data scientist whose great love is mathematics, but I also enjoy writing. My posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.
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You did a great job of illustrating your bona fidas with regard to reasonable accommodation, but I had to chuckle because it doesn't matter to the people who think any accommodation is reasonable. For these people, if Fetterman wants to wear a clown wig, a horsetail butt plug and no shoes, that would be just fine. It makes a mockery of people who need real and reasonable accommodation to pretend like anything goes.
The really stupid part of this is that on a Senator's salary, you can buy very comfortable formal wear that looks like a nice suit, but feels like you're wearing sweatpants. There's no reason whatsoever for Fetterman to wear his gym rat outfit instead of getting tailored, comfortable suits.
I'm totally with you on this one, Holly. Why a grown man who presumably wishes to be considered capable and respectable chooses to appear like a clown is beyond me. What's his message to his constituents? Whom does he imagine he's "sticking it" to? Dressing appropriate to the circumstances does not trigger depressive episodes. I'm in a position to know.