Has the ACLU lost its mind?

• Author: Etzioni, Amitai
• Position: American Civil Liberties Union is becoming too unethical

Foes of the American Civil Liberties Union believe it has veered off to the left; friends argue that friends should not criticize a beleaguered champion of the freedom of speech. But only those who keep close tabs realize that the ACLU has gone silly.

The ACLU used to play an important role in our nation, particularly in the protection and expansion of First Amendment rights. Many of the principles for which it fought are now taken for granted. Prior to 1920, the year the ACLU was founded, the Supreme Court had never upheld a free speech claim under the First Amendment. In its first year, the ACLU helped gain the release of hundreds of prisoners whose only crime had been that they spoke out against World War I. During World War II, the ACLU provided one of the few voices that condemned the relocation of Japanese-Americans to internment camps. In the fifties, the ACLU was a leader in the battle against the McCarthy era "loyalty oaths." Even these days, occasionally it still gets the job right. A case in point is the ACLU endeavor to protect the jobs of whistleblowers.

But even ACLU aficionados did a double take when they read that the organization had marshaled its legal big guns to protect the rights of lawyers to file misleading bills. The case involved none other than Senator Alfonse D'Amato's brother Armand, who was convicted of fraud in a plan to influence the senator. Armand collected money from a corporation by billing it for legal services that were never performed. In exchange, Armand promised the corporation access to Senator D'Amato. Several bar associations attacked the ruling on the flimsy grounds that such a billing practice is common among lawyers and that it is protected by client-lawyer privilege. When New York ACLU representative Arthur Eisenberg was asked what the hell possessed the ACLU to side with Armand, he explained: The ACLU is concerned that D'Amato would be convicted, not of influence peddling, but under a Federal mail fraud statute, and the ACLU believes the wording of these statutes is not sufficiently precise. Got it?

When the new mayor of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani, tried to get kids back into school by drawing on new community police officers to help locate truants, the ACLU protested. The executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Norman Siegel, told a reporter that "the cops see these kids as criminals; educators see them as consumers of school services. You have two different views...