Staying engaged.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye - David Cole

Spending time in Washington, D.C., these days poses an almost existential problem: How do we stay hopeful during this bleak season? David Cole, the renowned First Amendment lawyer, offered an answer recently, at a reception in his honor hosted by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg at the Supreme Court. A small group of progressive lawyers, ACLU members, refugees from Democratic Administrations, and other like-minded folks were in attendance. Quoting Cornel West and Roberto Unger, Cole said, "It is not hope that gets people engaged in struggle. It is being engaged in struggle that gives people hope."

Cole himself seems to embody this idea. He radiates enthusiasm despite doing the kind of work that could easily get anyone down. Author of Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism, Cole has fought overbearing government power throughout his career. His client Nasser Ahmed, an Egyptian dissident, was freed in 1999 after being detained by the INS for three and a half years on what turned out to be flimsy secret evidence. In the wake of September 11 and the Patriot Act, Cole has continued to fight an emboldened federal government as it criminalizes dissent and denies prisoners of the "war on terror" their most basic legal rights.

Cole received the Thomas Jefferson Center's William J. Brennan Jr. Award for free expression, in honor of his First Amendment work. That includes two landmark flag-burning cases and the famous case involving performance artist Karen Finley, whose work was deemed obscene and denied funding by the NEA. Nowadays, Cole is doing more work on due process and immigrant rights as a pro-bono attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights. But there is "some overlap" between his First Amendment and civil rights cases, Josh Wheeler of the Thomas Jefferson Center noted dryly: "Being able to speak with your attorney, we think, is a First Amendment right."

Today, two of Cole's clients, Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh, face deportation because of a retroactive clause in the Patriot Act, punishing them for distributing PLO propaganda in Los Angeles in the 1980s, when it was legal to do so. The current political climate, Cole said, makes it easy to focus on the negative. The same week he received his award, he argued a case in California in which the other side asserted that "in the wake of 9/11, the federal government has the right to criminalize all support of any foreign organization, even the...