NYT Magazine:
Can the A.C.L.U. Become the N.R.A. for the Left?
Quote:
In the 15 months that followed the election, the A.C.L.U.’s membership went from 400,000 to 1.84 million. Online donations in the years before averaged between $3 and $5 million annually. Since then, it has raised just shy of $120 million. “Until Trump,” Romero told me, “most of our support came from people who have been with us since we challenged Nixon. Now we’re kind of cool. Cool’s not a word generally associated with us.”
Also this part kind of hurts to read: the ACLU's plan for a Hillary presidency
Quote:
After years at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a professorship at Georgetown Law, Cole took over as the A.C.L.U.’s national legal director a week and a half before Trump took office. He accepted the job in the late summer of 2016, when the future was all Hillary Clinton and Merrick Garland and the first liberal Supreme Court in nearly 50 years. “Anthony wooed me with visions of presiding over the new golden age of civil rights and civil liberties litigation,” he said when I first met him. (Romero walked me through the plans they had formulated in the event of a Clinton victory: “Knocking out the death penalty as unconstitutional. Establishing solitary confinement as cruel and unusual punishment. Challenging the Hyde Amendment,” which prohibits Medicaid funding for a vast majority of abortion services. “Blanket protection against L.G.B.T. discrimination. The application of the Fourth Amendment and privacy protections in a digital world. Indigent defense and racial profiling and mass incarceration. ...”)
2016 set us back so, so far.
The ACLU's national political director, who joined in January 2017, was quite prescient about the future of Trump's presidency:
Quote:
When I first met Shakir, a month or so after he started the job, I asked if he could imagine anything that would cause Republicans to start peeling away from the president. He smiled and slowly shook his head. “My prediction is that we will see levels of cowardice and cynicism that will be awe-inspiring. As long as Trump doesn’t start offending the evangelical base or step on a land mine when it comes to Israel, they’re going to let him do whatever he wants.”
How efforts to turn out the vote have worked so far, using Krasner's victory for Philadelphia DA as an example:
Quote:
The earliest test case took place in May 2017 during a Democratic primary for district attorney in Philadelphia. The race represented a rare open seat in one of America’s most heavily incarcerated cities. Udi Ofer, the A.C.L.U.’s deputy national political director, analyzed voting patterns and estimated that A.C.L.U. members in the Philadelphia area — 11,438 voters — made up roughly a quarter of all the people who vote in primaries there. They then hired formerly incarcerated individuals to go door to door, talking about their experience in prison and mass incarceration. It was a simple message, Romero said: “If you were to cast a meaningful vote in this D.A. race, here are the issues we think you should consider.” The winner of that primary and ultimately the election was Larry Krasner, whose reform-focused approach to racial discrimination in policing is more or less unheard-of among big-city district attorneys in the United States.
They also did advocacy for winning candidates in Wisconsin's state Supreme Court race, and Mecklenburg County sheriff.
And, bringing it all together, how the ACLU's mission is shifting in the age of Trump:
Quote:
In a recent article for The New Yorker by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Ira Glasser, who preceded Romero as the A.C.L.U.’s executive director for two decades, said of the involvement in candidates’ races: “I regard this as a departure which has the capacity to destroy the organization as it has always existed.” What the A.C.L.U. does, Glasser and others have pointed out, is unique among advocacy groups in America. It is the only one purely committed to defending the Constitution. Once you wade into politics, the sanctity of that commitment risks getting stained.
I brought this critique up with Romero. “These claims of catastrophic damage to the organization’s future,” Romero said, but then trailed off with a shrug, as if to imply he found it hard to take them too seriously. “What can I say? Some people don’t like change. Are we endorsing candidates? No. Are we creating a PAC? No. Will we sue the asses off of any candidate who might benefit from our involvement now if they do the wrong thing on civil liberties? Yes. Does anyone get a pass from us in the future? Hell, no. What we’re doing is operationalizing. Just like the N.R.A. It’s time. If anything, the A.C.L.U. has been too reluctant to involve ourselves in the political process.”
It also goes into detail on the ACLU's lawsuit on behalf of Ms. L, a Congolese refugee who arrived legally at a US port of entry to request asylum and was separated from her kid for months anyway. Heartbreaking story.
If you love America, or at least what it pretends to stand for, I hope you'll consider supporting the ACLU if you don't already.