More on the ACLU's conflicting principles

The internal disputes over the ACLU's First Amendment activities is back, this time over the National Office's amicus brief in the NRA lawsuit challenging New York's practice of pressuring insurance companies, banks, and other regulated businesses not to do business with the organization. This Slate story describes some of the internal conversations responding to Legal Director David Cole's explanation for writing the brief, including a memorandum in response by three people in the New York affiliate. That memo made three points--this is not a novel case or a straight-forward free-speech issue; the NRA has the resources to litigate and the ACLU should consider whether to spend its limited resources helping litigants with "enormous resources at their disposal" as opposed to less-resourced groups, such as Black Lives Matter; and representing the NRA has negative effects on the ACLU's representation with "important allies." Several people objected to the National Office's argument that New York's tactics could be used against groups such as BLM, rejecting the use of BLM as a "shield" to justify representing groups that are causing the very problems, such as gun violence, in the African-American communities that BLM is trying to address. The article closes by suggesting that such disputes may cause the ACLU to "soon abandon its adherence to formal neutrality—and adopt a vision of liberty that openly favors the oppressed over the oppressors."

Regardless of the merits of whether BLM might be targeted, it is beside the point in this brief. A more salient and ongoing example, which the brief included, is states targeting Planned Parenthood, which stands for some in the same position the NRA does for others.

As to the article's final point, that vision of First Amendment liberty is no vision at all. A Muslim should not have less religious liberty than a Christian, nor should government be able to disadvantage powerful organizations but not powerless organizations in retaliation for their speech. And an organization committed to civil liberty should not approach liberty questions that way.

The resources argument (putting aside whether it has any merit) strikes me as inaposite in this case. The ACLU is not representing the NRA in this case, so any expenditure of ACLU resources does not relieve the NRA of the burden to spend money on its own lawyers to make its own arguments. The benefit of the ACLU's brief, on which it did expend some of its limited resources, is to the NRA's legal position, not to its wallet. An argument that the ACLU not only should not represent well-resourced parties* but should not provide amicus support for well-resourced parties seems over-inclusive, tying the merits of a party's constitutional position to the money in its bank account.

[*] This argument remains strange for another reason--representation makes the ACLU eligible to recover attorney's fees if it prevails. So it should recover at least some of the resources.