Ryan | WRITING COMMS OPEN

A Justice Department lawyer just signed a memo saying disabled Americans have no right to live in their own homes. In the same document, she admits no court in the country agrees with her. Read that again. A government official wrote down, in black and white, that her own argument is wrong by every legal standard of the last thirty years, and she made it anyway. Here is what it means in plain terms. Right now, 8.4 million people get help that lets them stay in their own homes. Aides who help them dress. Care that lets them work, see friends, raise their kids, sleep in their own beds at night. This memo tells states they can cut all of it. And if they cut it, where do those people go? Into nursing homes. Into institutions. Into facilities where someone else decides when you wake up, what you eat, who your roommate is, whether you go outside today. A lawyer who has visited people locked in these places said their whole world shrinks to one hallway. That is the future this memo is opening the door to. Keeping people in their own homes is cheaper. In one case, home care cost under $7,500 a year. The nursing home would have cost close to $50,000. The cruel option is also the expensive one. They want to spend more money to make people's lives worse. So why? Because last summer Trump signed an order to deal with homelessness by force, by sweeping people off the streets and committing them. He said it out loud during the campaign: the mentally ill belong back in institutions. The only thing standing in the way was the law that says people deserve to live in their own communities. This memo is how they get around it. And it landed the same week Republicans slashed Medicaid, giving every cash-strapped state the perfect excuse to start cutting. A think tank drew up the plan. A lawyer wrote the memo. A president signed the order. Three signatures, and millions of people could lose the right to their own front door. We are about to spend the summer celebrating 250 years of American freedom. Some Americans are about to find out it doesn't include them.