Steve Forbes, Joe Camel, and the ACLU: government isn't the only threat to our civil liberties. So is the power of money.

• Author: Shenk, Joshua Wolf
• Position: American Civil Liberties Union cases

The President's approval rating is in the cellar; his prized crime bill is teetering. Senator Bob Rumson, his nemesis, is flinging dirt and climbing in the polls. Meanwhile, rabid reporters are hounding his press secretary in the briefing room. "Robin," one of them hollers, "will the president ever respond to Senator Rumson's question about being a member of the American Civil Liberties Union?"

In 1988, Michael Dukakis withered under such a charge from George Bush. But this is not real politics. It's liberal fantasy wrapped in celluloid: Rob Reiner's The American President. Just as the reporter drops the ACLU bomb, President Andrew Shepherd (with all the poise and good looks of Michael Douglas) bursts through the door. "Yes I am a card carrying member of the ACLU," he says. "But the more important question is, why aren't you, Bob? This is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights, so the natural question is why wouldn't a senator choose to uphold the Constitution?"

Douglas's character goes on to praise the ACLU with the reverence normally reserved for the Declaration of Independence, Abe Lincoln, and little league baseball. But the organization didn't need a good publicist to plant this homage. It has spent 76 years defending unpopular speech, unpopular people, and unpopular causes and earned great respect in the process. Founded in 1920 to stand up to A. Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson's red-baiting, immigrant-bashing attorney general, the ACLU has fought for the rights of blacks, immigrants, atheists, and homosexuals. Though it is derided as extremist, there is no question that the organization has made this country safer and more free for all minorities: religious, ideological, racial, what have you.

But in recent years the ACLU has devoted extraordinary energy to defending the rights and interests of another minority group--extremely wealthy individuals and corporations. You won't find these cases trumpeted in the group's annual report or on its slick World Wide Web pages. But ACLU lawyers are in the trenches fighting for Steve Forbes's right to spend unlimited amounts on his campaign for the presidency and for RJ Reynolds's right to lure young smokers with Joe Camel ads.

The ACLU insists it is merely doing what it has always done: defending First Amendment protections for everyone. Wealthy politicians and tobacco companies, it argues, deserve the same privileges of unrestricted free speech as anyone.

For the most part, that is true. But, as we all know, no right is absolute. Everyone recognizes that the right to extend a fist ends at another person's nose, and that yelling "fire" in a crowded theater isn't protected speech. What is equally obvious to most--but considered heresy wrong the lawyers at ACLU--is that the right to spend money to advance one's own interests can and should be limited when it does substantial harm to the country at large. The ACLU might be more inclined to understand this fact if they weren't themselves accepting generous donations from the tobacco industry ($920,000 in the last 10 years).

ACLU lawyers proudly declare themselves extremists n the pursuit of liberty. But by opposing campaign finance reform and reasonable limits on corporate behavior, they are showing themselves to be extremists in pursuit of stupidity. In a time when the public sector is shrinking, and the private sector is taking up the slack, government is not the only power that can threaten freedom. So can the almighty dollar, and the ACLU needs to wake up to this reality. As it is, the group is not only sullying its august reputation; it is betraying the very causes it purports to defend.

On the Wrong Side

On its 75th anniversary last year, the ACLU published a list of its "greatest hits" of Supreme Court cases, many of which are truly inspiring. Smith vs. Allwright in 1944 prevented the exclusion of blacks from political primaries. In Hague vs. CIO, the Court affirmed the broad right to gather in public places. The list is full of landmarks in American legal history--Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1954, Gideon vs. Wainwright in 1963, New York Times vs. Sullivan in 1964-in which the ACLU was involved.

There is an ugly duckling on this list, however: a 1975 case called Buckley vs. Valeo, in which the Supreme Court forbade spending limits for candidates in federal elections. This ruling, strongly supported by...