When I pointed out that the big money interests who fund alleged public interests groups are mostly interested in paying a little go get a lot the other day, I didn't know that the ever way ahead of me Sheldon Whitehouse along with other Senators, Senator Merkley prominently among them, would have the numbers of just how profitable capturing the Supreme Court has been for them. As I noted, though they might not be in the same sleazy pipeline of the Federalist Society and its two fellow front groups that Senator Whitehouse exposed during the confirmation hearings last week, they certainly seem to have a similar effect in the results of their advocacy.
Only it's only when they do the "free speech - free press" thing that they seem to have much in the way of success with the court. Their few flagship cases in which they've had some effect on some of the more outrageous instances of right wing damage to people without money or power seen to me to have little real life consequence as compared to, for example, their advocacy for industries that produce addictive, health damaging and dangerous products, tobacco, alcohol, drugs, and for getting the right of the media to lie in their own interest (I doubt the media ever much carries lies that are not to their interest) and on behalf of billionaires and millionaires to finance those lies, the same source of corruption in our politics that recent decisions in which the ACLU joined with the dark money that Sheldon Whitehouse exposed to get the ability of foreign billionaries to fund.
I don't recall who it was who pointed out that it was a remarkable thing that the Scalia-Barrett style "originalists" somehow always seemed to find that their ideology never seemed to much come up with results they didn't like and that if it did you could bet they would never stick with "originalism" or its even more extreme "textualist" method. And the same can be said of any ideological position, ideological committment, or the pose of it, will not be kept by someone who finds it does things they don't like. I think that holds for when you call an ideological position a "principle" such as the free-speech-free-press absolutism of the ACLU. It has corrupted our politics over the course of the past fifty six years, driving it ever to the right and into corruption from the high point of the early Johnson years when the major landmarks of, not only the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed into law which the present Supreme Court is destroying but also things like Medicaid and Medicare.
I don't think the lawyers of the ACLU are much bothered by the results of their advocacy in destroying the very things that liberals are supposed to praise them for because if they were bothered by those things they wouldn't keep doing them seeing the results their advocacy has gotten since Nixon took power and the media was free to lie and vilify Democrats and to make "liberal" a dirty word. And "Democrat" another one.
I don't think they much mind because I think those at the top of that organization have an interest in the little that is paid to them to get those who pay them a lot. And it's small change compared to what the groups that Sheldon Whitehouse et al are concentrating on. Though I think that for length of time at it and the damage it has done there is no group quite like the ACLU for clean-handed corruption, being allowed to escape anyone noting that what seems to be incidentally unfortunate in results from their advocacy seems to be one of its most consistent and persistent results.
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