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The ACLU’s Path Of Most Resistance

People attend ACLU's "Resistance Training" event in Miami, Florida on March 11, 2017. 
With 1,500 attendees, ACLU launched People Power, a grassroots mobilization platform designed to help organize actions against US president Donald Trump.
LEILA MACOR/AFP/Getty Images
People attend ACLU's "Resistance Training" event in Miami, Florida on March 11, 2017. With 1,500 attendees, ACLU launched People Power, a grassroots mobilization platform designed to help organize actions against US president Donald Trump.

President Donald Trump’s 72nd birthday was on June 14, and celebrity power couple Chrissy Teigen and John Legend wanted to celebrate.

— christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) June 14, 2018

Teigen and Legend’s push netted nearly a million dollars for the American Civil Liberties Union, which is spearheading a class-action lawsuit challenging President Trump’s familial separation policy, among other issues.

Between the 2016 election and August 2017, membership in the group almost quadrupled, according to The New York Times. Donations online reached $83 million, when, in a typical period, about $5 million or less might be expected.

The organization is changing. Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes in The New Yorker:

For most of its ninety-eight years of existence, the A.C.L.U. has spent its resources largely on litigation, arguing for civil liberties, and against government excess, in the courts. Part of the organization’s DNA is a Bill of Rights purism—the group, always liberal, has famously defended the rights of neo-Nazis and Klansmen to protest—and it has been fastidiously nonpartisan, so prudish about any alliance with political power that its leadership, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, declined even to give awards to like-minded legislators for fear that it might give the wrong impression.

Now, the ACLU has started spending money on political races and ballot initiatives — to the tune of more than 25 million dollars.

The ACLU experienced backlash after they went to court to protect the right of white nationalists to hold a rally in Charlottesville. In the ensuing violence, a 32-year-old woman was killed.

We’re talking to the organization’s president, Susan Herman, about the changing role of the ACLU. How did it become one of the vanguards of the #Resistance?

Gabrielle Healy

GUESTS

Susan Herman, President, American Civil Liberties Union; @SusanHermanACLU

For more, visit https://the1a.org.

© 2018 WAMU 88.5 – American University Radio.

Copyright 2018 WAMU 88.5

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