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Under Biden, the Department of Justice sued Tennessee for violating the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) because it criminalized prostitution by women infected with the HIV virus.

The Americans With Disabilities Act or the ADA had been previously invoked by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to file a statement of interest arguing that a Georgia prison must offer “gender-affirming surgery” to an unnamed 55-year-old inmate because “gender dysphoria falls within the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)’s definition of ‘disability.'”

While things have improved under the Trump administration, the ways in which the Biden DOJ wielded and abused the ADA to protect everything from prostitution to assailing election integrity are a warning that reforming it is urgent for maintaining free elections and the rule of law.

When President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law in 1990, he could not have imagined the bizarre ways judges and prosecutors would misuse it today.

The Biden DOJ’s interpretations of the ADA went far beyond the original legislation and violate the clear and unambiguous wording of the law. The ADA bill specifically stated that it does not cover “gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments” as a disability.

Activist judges and prosecutors however ignored both the text and the publicly stated intent of legislators by arguing that gender dysphoria is not a gender disorder because, in the words of Judge Joseph F. Leeson, Jr., of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, gender dysphoria “goes beyond merely identifying with a different gender and is characterized by clinically significant stress.”

Word games and reinterpretations have been used to remove limitations on government power, redefine the concept of disability and abuse the ADA to shield criminal and dangerous behavior.

Biden’s Justice Department had argued that Tennessee should not be able to enforce aggressive prostitution laws because HIV status transforms prostitution from a greater offense into a protected disability. The Department’s ADA interventions targeting the Pennsylvania court system and Alabama’s Medicaid services contended that drug abuse should be treated as a disability, even though the ADA specifically excluded drug use as a protected disability.

If drug use is a disability then the entire War on Drugs is a violation of the ADA. Such a notion may seem absurd, but leftists have a long history of taking limited provisions of civil rights law and exploding them into massive government power grabs with virtually unlimited scope.

And transforming transgenderism and drug use into a disability is only the beginning.

When new interpretations of the ADA aren’t licensing crimes, they’re serving political purposes.

One of the most nakedly political Biden ADA interventions filed by his Justice Department was one challenging Georgia’s restrictions on drop boxes and ballot harvesting. The state required that ballots be returned only by family members or caregivers and orders that drop boxes be located inside buildings. The Justice Department for its part did not disagree that there are “multiple ways for voters with disabilities to vote, including through in-person and absentee voting” in Georgia, but argued that disabled voters also have to have an “equal opportunity to vote by a particular method.”

Election integrity itself becomes an ADA violation.

Frivolous ADA lawsuits over accessibility have become notorious for destroying countless small businesses facing tens of thousands of dollars in costs, fines or damages over a few inches of difference in the size of a table or a door, but the Biden Justice Department also quietly redefined disability while pursuing the Biden administration’s election agenda.

Previous generations of activists at the Justice Department had learned that the civil rights legislation of the sixties could become tools of unlimited political and social change far beyond what the legislators had ever intended. It’s happening now all over again as the Justice Department is discovering that anything can be an ADA protected disability.

Biden’s politicized abuses of the ADA which touch on seemingly unrelated issues such as rising crime and election integrity are a warning that reforming the Americans With Disabilities Act is crucial to limiting government power and the partisan misuse of civil rights laws.

When President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans With Disabilities Act into law, he promised that it will mean that “people with disabilities are given the basic guarantees for which they have worked so long and so hard: independence, freedom of choice, control of their lives.”

For some, the ADA has delivered just that, but others have been deprived of their livelihoods, safety, and control over their lives. When the ADA is used to protect drug abuse, prostitution and election fraud, even the legislation’s greatest defenders must admit that it’s time for reform.