Cite as: 527 U. S. 471 (1999)
Stevens, J., dissenting
without glasses as an employment qualification for its pilots. Presumably it would not insist on such a qualification unless it has a sound business justification for doing so (an issue we do not address today). But if United regards petitioners as unqualified because they cannot see well without glasses, it seems eminently fair for a court also to use uncorrected vision as the basis for evaluating petitioners' life activity of seeing.
Under the agencies' approach, individuals with poor eyesight and other correctable impairments will, of course, be able to file lawsuits claiming discrimination on that basis. Yet all of those same individuals can already file employment discrimination claims based on their race, sex, or religion, and—provided they are at least 40 years old—their age. Congress has never seen this as reason to restrict classes of antidiscrimination coverage. Indeed, it is hard to believe that providing individuals with one more antidiscrimination protection will make any more of them file baseless or vexatious lawsuits. To the extent that the Court is concerned with requiring employers to answer in litigation for every employment practice that draws distinctions based on physical attributes, that anxiety should be addressed not in this case, but in one that presents an issue regarding employers' affirmative defenses.
In the end, the Court is left only with its tenacious grip on Congress' finding that "some 43,000,000 Americans have one or more physical or mental disabilities," 42 U. S. C. § 12101(a)(1)—and that figure's legislative history extrapolated from a law review "article authored by the drafter of the original ADA bill introduced in Congress in 1988." Ante, at 484. We previously have observed that a "statement of congressional findings is a rather thin reed upon which to base" a statutory construction. National Organization for Women, Inc. v. Scheidler, 510 U. S. 249, 260 (1994). Even so, as I have noted above, I readily agree that the agencies' approach to the Act would extend coverage to more than that number of people (although the Court's lofty esti-
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