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United States News Title: Inside the A.C.L.U.’s War on Trump In August, the A.C.L.U. will focus on the county prosecutor’s race in St. Louis County, where there is a long history of racial discrimination in policing. (The incumbent is Robert P. McCullouch, who faced criticism for not pushing to bring charges in the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson.) The group is also looking for ways to affect the Arizona Republican Senate primary this fall, where Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, is running against Kelli Ward, a doctor, and Martha McSally, a state representative and former Air Force squadron commander. Arpaio was found guilty of violating a judge’s order preventing him from detaining immigrants based solely on his suspicion that they lacked legal status. He was pardoned by Trump last August and announced that he would run to succeed Senator Jeff Flake, one of the few Republicans to speak out against Trump. “I mean, that guy,” Shakir said. “How can we not be involved in that race?” And in Kansas, where Kris Kobach, the secretary of state, is running for governor, the group has been polling Republican primary and general election voters. It found that 44 percent of them “have serious doubts” about Kobach as a result of the disregard for people’s privacy inherent in his voter-identification efforts. “Our own modeling shows there is a slice of conservatives who are happy to hear from the A.C.L.U,” Shakir said. “We want to be talking to them, not just to true-blue, dyed-in-the-wool resisters.” This level of political involvement, no matter the affiliation, hasn’t settled well with all A.C.L.U. backers. 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.” In the 2016 fiscal year, he told me, the budget for its political arm was $37.7 million. For the 2018 fiscal year, which ended in March, the budget was $103.6 million. The budget for litigation (which also includes education and operations) in 2018 was $122.7 million. “The political work is of a commensurate size with the legal work,” Romero said. “That’s how it should be. The pincers movement is the only way to deliver. People did not give to the A.C.L.U. for us to put that money into a bank account. If at the end of this year what I have to show to all of these people rushing to become members of the organization is a better balance sheet, I’d get properly skewered. Shame on us if we don’t find a way to put that money to use.” I got a text from Lee Gelernt just after midnight on June 27, four days after his call with Judge Sabraw: “We won just now. Reunification ordered for all kids within 30 days. Kids under 5 within 14 days!!” It seemed impossible. Impossible because hours earlier the Supreme Court affirmed Trump’s travel ban, a piece of news that had hung over everything like a haze. And impossible because the unfolding nightmare of these families seemed to exist beyond the reach of rules, a kind of chaos unleashed that couldn’t be contained. But this ruling meant that there was now a pathway to these parents and their children finding one another, and that path led back to a single case, one mother and her child. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread |
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