Following a successful fight against Donald Trump’s initial Muslim ban in the courts, the ACLU is building on the Trump resistance and has launched a new campaign to help empower Americans “in defense of their constitutional rights”:
The ACLU is spending millions of dollars on a plunge into grass-roots politics — a “People Power” campaign. It’s the newest and largest development from a sprawling “resistance” movement that regularly moves faster than the Democratic Party’s leaders can think and isn’t waiting on politicians for cues.
People Power debuted this weekend in South Florida and, by the organization’s estimate, at thousands of weekend house parties nationwide. Everyone who showed up received a nine-point plan to turn blue America into a network of “freedom cities” by defying the president’s executive orders, his health-care agenda and his Justice Department. Anyone who missed it could visit PeoplePower.org, the latest catchall website to find actions that would get results.
The key to the effort: targeting Trump’s policies, rather than the man or his words. If 2016 taught Democrats anything, it’s that attacking Trump isn’t enough.
“We’ve seen this exponential growth in people becoming card-carrying members of the ACLU,” Romero said in an interview after his speech. “They’re younger. They’re in every state around the country. The biggest danger was in not doing something like this, where people get apathetic and they fall asleep.”
“Our country has been, until now, admired the world over as a beacon of hope because of our tradition of welcoming people,” said author and activist Padma Lakshmi, herself an immigrant, at the launch. "What makes America great is our culture of inclusion. We must not tolerate the intolerance.”
In addition to the new campaign, the ACLU has joined in another legal effort against Trump, this time targeting his Muslim ban 2.0, “alleging the new directive still discriminates against Muslims despite changes intended to insulate it from the legal claims that doomed that last one.”
"We will bring all the lawsuits necessary to defend these rights,” ACLU executive director Anthony Romero told the “People Power” audience. “We'll do the work in the courts. You do the work in the streets.”