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this was taken from the Chicago Tribune's "Tempo" section in Today's newspaper:
Liberty's bellwether
The ACLU says its clients are the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Those make for pretty demanding clients these days.
By Sid Smith
Tribune staff reporter
Published December 11, 2001
Doris sits at her desk, fielding one call after another.
Some are the usual.
"You say the police broke down your door and beat up your fiance? Did they have a search warrant? Wait a minute. Please hold."
Pause.
"No, I'm sorry. We don't handle workman's comp."
Then there are the calls that seem unique to the times.
A teacher phones. She says she feels she's being coerced by her school administration into forcing her class to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
Doris arranges to have her talk with the intake staffer.
As the receptionist at the Chicago office of the American Civil Liberties Union, Doris is the frontline warrior for the hot-button organization better known by both fans and detractors as the ACLU. She is a busy woman these days, what with the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights being stretched to the limit like they haven't been since World War II.
Those two hallowed documents are the chief concern of her boss, Executive Director Colleen Connell, who took over the ACLU's Chicago chapter in January, less than a year before world events made civil liberties a hot topic again.
Connell would argue that the Constitution and Bill of Rights are always front and center, but even she admits that the aftermath of Sept. 11 is keeping legislators and "card-carrying members of the ACLU" extra-busy.
Would she call this, therefore, a good or bad time for civil liberties?
"Both," she answers.
There is a well of irony in the fact that the president she's now sometimes battling is son of the man who coined the "card-carrying" remark, intended as a slap at his opponent, liberal Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, as part of his 1988 presidential bid. Ironic, but irrelevant, she insists.
"This isn't personal," she says. "That was just politics. I was here at the time Bush One said that, and none of us lost sleep."
But current events are making for a much more substantive debate under the president Connell would call Bush Two.
"Civil liberties are always relevant, and we've been busy for each of the 20 years I've been here," she says. "But since Sept. 11, we find ourselves wholly deployed, because none of the other issues we were looking at went away."
And now there are so many more, coming so fast. In October, Congress passed a federal anti-terrorism bill (the ACLU opposed), and on the recent day of a journalist's visit, the Illinois House passed one of its own, OKd a day earlier by the state Senate. (The ACLU opposes that one too.)
In addition, Bush's executive order providing for secret military tribunals as part of the war on terrorism is anathema to the organization, whose strange bedfellows on this issue include conservative columnist William Safire and arch-conservative U.S. Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.).
Offending the Constitution
"[U.S. Atty. Gen. John] Ashcroft's proposals offend not just the 5th and 6th Amendments to the Constitution, which involve the rights against self-incrimination and to a lawyer," says Connell of the military tribunals. "Those are profound issues in themselves. But this argument goes much deeper. These proposals offend the very constitutional structure our founders left us, threatening the right of the judiciary as a co-equal branch. That's the essence of divided government.
"If we could try the Nazis, whose atrocities rivaled if not surpassed those of Sept. 11, in open trial according to set procedures, we should be able to do it here," she continues.
"We are at war," responds Scott Stanzel, a White House spokesman. "The tribunals are directed strictly against non-citizens, and the president has made it clear he simply wanted this as an option in order to protect U.S. citizens. He's gratified that the mass majority of the American public supports him on this."
The ACLU is no happier with October's federal legislation, which passed in the Senate with only one dissenting vote, from Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold.
"The bill stripped away a lot of the role of the judiciary to supervise law enforcement activities, particularly wiretapping," Connell says. "It further weakened judicial supervision of the search warrant.
"Historically, a warrant had to be obtained from a judge and presented to you at your door, where you could have the chance to challenge it. Now, under what's called the sneak-and-peek warrant, I can go in when you're not home, look around, go away and come back. I don't have to serve the warrant, so you don't have a chance to challenge it."
"I shared some of the ACLU's concerns [as far as] proposals in the federal act," says Todd Gaziano, director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank. "But some of their arguments were false or exaggerated. They claimed the definition of terrorism was so broad it would sweep in all vandalism, but no plausible interpretation of the bill would support that claim.
"And they're misleading when they imply the so-called sneak-and-peek provision is anything new," he adds. "The legislature is simply clarifying and making uniform a practice the courts have already approved. That might result in more protection, actually, than the way it had evolved in the court."
The Illinois bill would expand wiretapping authority in terrorist cases, make it a state felony to get on a plane with a weapon--arising from a high-profile incident in which several weapons were discovered at O'Hare--and allow for forfeiture of property tied to terrorist activities. The legislation raises the ACLU's hackles, its directors say, because it eliminates the requirement that requests for wiretaps specify the place of the interception. Large numbers of conversations by innocent parties will be overheard as a result, the organization says, raising privacy concerns as well.
The bill also adds a new aggravating factor to the Illinois death penalty code: Those found guilty of terrorist activities are now eligible for execution too. The ACLU argues that the factor is redundant--most acts of terrorism are already on the capital punishment list (hijacking a plane, bus or train, for instance, or killing one or more people in a particularly heinous way)--and that the bill is dubious legislation at a time when the state's administration of the death penalty is so under fire.
No similarity with 1941
Defenders of the crackdown might say that none of it is like rounding up Japanese-Americans and interning them, as was done by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's order during World War II.
But Ed Yohnka, the Chicago ACLU's director of communications, counters: "It's ironic [that] you're at a point where you talk of not doing `X' when `X' was, after all, something you had to apologize for. And this is about our system of laws and changing it, a system set up in the 18th Century."
Connell also points out that the time frame was different. "Japanese-Americans were not interned right after Pearl Harbor but months later," she says. "We should watch that parallel. We've also gotten progressively more reactionary as the time between Sept. 11 and now increases. Just because we didn't go out and round up all Arab-Americans the next day doesn't guarantee our liberties are safe for the rest of our lives."
For now, the group plans mostly to monitor all this. The Illinois legislation may prove less important, only because most terrorism investigations will probably be conducted at the federal level, Connell says. Staffers with the ACLU's Washington, D.C., office testified before Congress against the federal legislation; a Chicago attorney with the organization testified before the Illinois House Judiciary Committee involving that legislation; and the group lobbied legislators in Springfield about changes to the legislation.
"We do initiate lawsuits," she adds, acknowledging them as a component in the organization's arsenal. But the ACLU often waits for someone aggrieved by a statute to challenge it--someone who actually goes before a military tribunal, for instance, or even a congressman who argues he's aggrieved because his or her authority is being usurped.
Joining forces
For now, too, Safire, Barr and other Republicans are nipping at the administration's heels along with the ACLU.
But then, Connell and colleagues are used to shifting allies and find nothing strange in it. Contrary to popular myth, the organization considers itself neither liberal nor conservative. It is also bipartisan, despite the allusions in the 1988 presidential campaign. "We opposed many actions by the Clinton administration," Yohnka says. "Many of the initiatives Bush is now proposing were also suggested after the Oklahoma City bombings, and we opposed them then."
Neither is the organization anti-God or even anti-religion, they argue, despite its involvement in celebrated cases fighting the use of religious language and icons in government settings. A little more than a week ago, for example, the Virginia chapter of the group offered to help the Rev. Jerry Falwell's fight with the government in a dispute over church property rights, despite the fact he blamed the organization earlier for Sept. 11 in a diatribe for which he later apologized.
In this other case, they think he's right, so they're with him. "We're against efforts to create a state religion," Connell explains. "But, as defenders of the freedom of religion clause of the Constitution, we're also opposed to any government efforts to restrict religious freedom."
Within the organization itself, the contradiction is easily explained. "A hallmark of civil liberties advocacy is that you often have one or more constitutional rights that are at issue and in tension on the same matters," Connell puts it. "Is it free speech if someone is advocating a hateful position? Some feel the government should be more aggressive in going after people who articulate hate speech. We take the position that the Constitution protects speech, but it doesn't protect violence."
The battle between abortion rights advocates and abortion clinic protestors found the ACLU, at differing times, on both sides. "Does a woman have access to a clinic? Can she get in and out?" Connell asks. But then, "Are those who are in opposition kept so far away as to render their protest meaningless? We look at the facts of each individual case, especially when there's a tension between two rights.
Infuriating everybody
"Ultimately, our clients," adds Connell, "are the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. That defense has led us to advance positions contrary to doctrinaire liberal thinking," including the famous 1978 defense of the Chicago Nazi Party's effort to march in Skokie. In the end, the ACLU infuriates almost everybody.
"For the most part, we protect minority interests," says Harvey Grossman, the avuncular head of the organization's local staff of eight lawyers and a 21-year Chicago ACLU veteran. "The Bill of Rights generally does too. They relieve individuals from oppression either from the majority or the government. By definition, we're either opposing the majority or the actions of a popularly elected official."
The headquarters for all this is a sprawling modern office suite taking up all of the 23rd floor of the skyscraper at 180 N. Michigan Ave., sporting beautiful views of the river and Wrigley Building, but little else in terms of amenities. The artwork consists mostly of framed ACLU posters, all adorning the front areas, leaving much of the long white hallways bare but for their occasional smudge marks. The main conference room features a large table surrounded by a dozen or so caramel-colored leather chairs and one out-of-place cloth burgundy one, much of the furniture donated by IBM.
At full force, the office here houses 24 workers (there are currently three vacancies), part of a national network with offices in every single state, most of them smaller than Chicago's. A single staff member divides time between two offices in South and North Dakota, Connell's native state.
Connell's corner office is spartanly furnished, too, graced by a sofa and a large table displaying photos of her husband and two children, ages 9 and 11. Above her desk rests a black-and-white photo of Martin Luther King Jr., a holdover from her predecessor, Jay Miller, who retired in his early 70s after two decades in the post. "Who could take down a picture of Martin Luther King?" she asks.
"And behind you are Justices William Brennan and Harry Blackmun," she informs her guest, although tellingly she means not their images but samples of their words. Also tellingly, a leather-bound copy of the Federalist papers lies on her desk.
This is an office bland and colorless on the surface, teeming with drama underneath. Connell herself is a case in point.
Scholarly appeal
Polite, reserved and cool in demeanor, she is someone you might assume was a court official or scholar. She and Yohnka have an ongoing debate about her use of such terms as "evisceration" and "inchoate" on TV appearances. Hers is not the personality of a firebrand radical, but someone who can wax about the beauties of constitutional law the way a Shakespearean scholar might rhapsodize about "The Tempest." For her, this is the stuff of poetry.
Her journey here sounds an unlikely one. "I grew up in Medora, [N. D.] a town with a population of 129, and that's with no zeroes," she says. She is the daughter of a businessman "who was committed to serving the community and social change" and a World War II-era feminist. She is descended from independent women on both sides; her paternal great-grandmother was the daughter of Wyoming's Pony Express station manager.
If she talks with the deliberate, logical cadence of someone used to writing legal briefs, that's because she is a veteran lawyer and was the organization's point person on reproductive rights before taking the top job.
Look, feel of a law office
"This looks and sounds a lot like a law office because that's basically what it is," she says. Workers here routinely come in, work on depositions or other legal documents and dash out to court appearances.
Cases range from the short-lived to one that is 10 years old. The latter was settled in the ACLU's favor, but it is still ongoing in terms of enforcement follow-up, involving state family services.
When the guest suggests that the office is something of a think tank, Connell argues, "We're an action tank."
They are also not-for-profit; for lunch, Connell meets with a funder, a representative with the Chicago Community Trust.
Staff members here also testify before state and federal legislative bodies, field questions from the editorial boards of both major daily newspapers and engage in all sorts of public dialogue, from e-mails to each other across the country to media releases churned out daily by Yohnka.
Today, for instance, he carries around a draft of a release about Springfield's anti-terrorism vote. At noon, during a hurried sandwich lunch in the conference room, the phone rings, and it's Mary Dixon, the chapter's Springfield-based lobbyist. The house has passed the bill by a vote of 106 for, 1 against and 7 present. "This is one of those where a lot of the legislators who voted for it congratulated Mary on what we did to get the bill changed," he says with a sigh.
Around that time, Connell gets a call from a U.S. House Judiciary Committee staff member; a congressman is coming to Chicago to meet on the issue of military tribunals. The ACLU gets a lot of behind-the-scenes respect from legislators not hinted at in the headlines. This has its cynical side. "Legislators have told me by voting for a bill we oppose they get certain constituents off their back, while they're reassured we'll sue and get the bill declared unconstitutional anyway," Connell says.
Around 5 p.m., Doris -- a pseudonym by her request ("I live in a bad neighborhood and I don't want certain neighbors knowing I'm not home all day") -- will turn off the reception lights and lock the front door, although like so much else that goes on here, that's not final. Everyone has his or her own key.
"We're never finished, we're never done," Connell says not of the day, but of all the issues they deal in. Then, she quotes Thomas Jefferson: "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
After Doris leaves, Yohnka and Connell remain at their terminals, their phones still ringing long after daylight.
"This is exhilarating work, and I don't mean, `Aren't I important? I defend the 1st Amendment,' " Connell says, visibly tiring as the afternoon wanes. "This is a privilege, and it's fun, to boot."
Copyright © 2001, Chicago Tribune
~p~
Liberty's bellwether
The ACLU says its clients are the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Those make for pretty demanding clients these days.
By Sid Smith
Tribune staff reporter
Published December 11, 2001
Doris sits at her desk, fielding one call after another.
Some are the usual.
"You say the police broke down your door and beat up your fiance? Did they have a search warrant? Wait a minute. Please hold."
Pause.
"No, I'm sorry. We don't handle workman's comp."
Then there are the calls that seem unique to the times.
A teacher phones. She says she feels she's being coerced by her school administration into forcing her class to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
Doris arranges to have her talk with the intake staffer.
As the receptionist at the Chicago office of the American Civil Liberties Union, Doris is the frontline warrior for the hot-button organization better known by both fans and detractors as the ACLU. She is a busy woman these days, what with the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights being stretched to the limit like they haven't been since World War II.
Those two hallowed documents are the chief concern of her boss, Executive Director Colleen Connell, who took over the ACLU's Chicago chapter in January, less than a year before world events made civil liberties a hot topic again.
Connell would argue that the Constitution and Bill of Rights are always front and center, but even she admits that the aftermath of Sept. 11 is keeping legislators and "card-carrying members of the ACLU" extra-busy.
Would she call this, therefore, a good or bad time for civil liberties?
"Both," she answers.
There is a well of irony in the fact that the president she's now sometimes battling is son of the man who coined the "card-carrying" remark, intended as a slap at his opponent, liberal Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, as part of his 1988 presidential bid. Ironic, but irrelevant, she insists.
"This isn't personal," she says. "That was just politics. I was here at the time Bush One said that, and none of us lost sleep."
But current events are making for a much more substantive debate under the president Connell would call Bush Two.
"Civil liberties are always relevant, and we've been busy for each of the 20 years I've been here," she says. "But since Sept. 11, we find ourselves wholly deployed, because none of the other issues we were looking at went away."
And now there are so many more, coming so fast. In October, Congress passed a federal anti-terrorism bill (the ACLU opposed), and on the recent day of a journalist's visit, the Illinois House passed one of its own, OKd a day earlier by the state Senate. (The ACLU opposes that one too.)
In addition, Bush's executive order providing for secret military tribunals as part of the war on terrorism is anathema to the organization, whose strange bedfellows on this issue include conservative columnist William Safire and arch-conservative U.S. Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.).
Offending the Constitution
"[U.S. Atty. Gen. John] Ashcroft's proposals offend not just the 5th and 6th Amendments to the Constitution, which involve the rights against self-incrimination and to a lawyer," says Connell of the military tribunals. "Those are profound issues in themselves. But this argument goes much deeper. These proposals offend the very constitutional structure our founders left us, threatening the right of the judiciary as a co-equal branch. That's the essence of divided government.
"If we could try the Nazis, whose atrocities rivaled if not surpassed those of Sept. 11, in open trial according to set procedures, we should be able to do it here," she continues.
"We are at war," responds Scott Stanzel, a White House spokesman. "The tribunals are directed strictly against non-citizens, and the president has made it clear he simply wanted this as an option in order to protect U.S. citizens. He's gratified that the mass majority of the American public supports him on this."
The ACLU is no happier with October's federal legislation, which passed in the Senate with only one dissenting vote, from Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold.
"The bill stripped away a lot of the role of the judiciary to supervise law enforcement activities, particularly wiretapping," Connell says. "It further weakened judicial supervision of the search warrant.
"Historically, a warrant had to be obtained from a judge and presented to you at your door, where you could have the chance to challenge it. Now, under what's called the sneak-and-peek warrant, I can go in when you're not home, look around, go away and come back. I don't have to serve the warrant, so you don't have a chance to challenge it."
"I shared some of the ACLU's concerns [as far as] proposals in the federal act," says Todd Gaziano, director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank. "But some of their arguments were false or exaggerated. They claimed the definition of terrorism was so broad it would sweep in all vandalism, but no plausible interpretation of the bill would support that claim.
"And they're misleading when they imply the so-called sneak-and-peek provision is anything new," he adds. "The legislature is simply clarifying and making uniform a practice the courts have already approved. That might result in more protection, actually, than the way it had evolved in the court."
The Illinois bill would expand wiretapping authority in terrorist cases, make it a state felony to get on a plane with a weapon--arising from a high-profile incident in which several weapons were discovered at O'Hare--and allow for forfeiture of property tied to terrorist activities. The legislation raises the ACLU's hackles, its directors say, because it eliminates the requirement that requests for wiretaps specify the place of the interception. Large numbers of conversations by innocent parties will be overheard as a result, the organization says, raising privacy concerns as well.
The bill also adds a new aggravating factor to the Illinois death penalty code: Those found guilty of terrorist activities are now eligible for execution too. The ACLU argues that the factor is redundant--most acts of terrorism are already on the capital punishment list (hijacking a plane, bus or train, for instance, or killing one or more people in a particularly heinous way)--and that the bill is dubious legislation at a time when the state's administration of the death penalty is so under fire.
No similarity with 1941
Defenders of the crackdown might say that none of it is like rounding up Japanese-Americans and interning them, as was done by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's order during World War II.
But Ed Yohnka, the Chicago ACLU's director of communications, counters: "It's ironic [that] you're at a point where you talk of not doing `X' when `X' was, after all, something you had to apologize for. And this is about our system of laws and changing it, a system set up in the 18th Century."
Connell also points out that the time frame was different. "Japanese-Americans were not interned right after Pearl Harbor but months later," she says. "We should watch that parallel. We've also gotten progressively more reactionary as the time between Sept. 11 and now increases. Just because we didn't go out and round up all Arab-Americans the next day doesn't guarantee our liberties are safe for the rest of our lives."
For now, the group plans mostly to monitor all this. The Illinois legislation may prove less important, only because most terrorism investigations will probably be conducted at the federal level, Connell says. Staffers with the ACLU's Washington, D.C., office testified before Congress against the federal legislation; a Chicago attorney with the organization testified before the Illinois House Judiciary Committee involving that legislation; and the group lobbied legislators in Springfield about changes to the legislation.
"We do initiate lawsuits," she adds, acknowledging them as a component in the organization's arsenal. But the ACLU often waits for someone aggrieved by a statute to challenge it--someone who actually goes before a military tribunal, for instance, or even a congressman who argues he's aggrieved because his or her authority is being usurped.
Joining forces
For now, too, Safire, Barr and other Republicans are nipping at the administration's heels along with the ACLU.
But then, Connell and colleagues are used to shifting allies and find nothing strange in it. Contrary to popular myth, the organization considers itself neither liberal nor conservative. It is also bipartisan, despite the allusions in the 1988 presidential campaign. "We opposed many actions by the Clinton administration," Yohnka says. "Many of the initiatives Bush is now proposing were also suggested after the Oklahoma City bombings, and we opposed them then."
Neither is the organization anti-God or even anti-religion, they argue, despite its involvement in celebrated cases fighting the use of religious language and icons in government settings. A little more than a week ago, for example, the Virginia chapter of the group offered to help the Rev. Jerry Falwell's fight with the government in a dispute over church property rights, despite the fact he blamed the organization earlier for Sept. 11 in a diatribe for which he later apologized.
In this other case, they think he's right, so they're with him. "We're against efforts to create a state religion," Connell explains. "But, as defenders of the freedom of religion clause of the Constitution, we're also opposed to any government efforts to restrict religious freedom."
Within the organization itself, the contradiction is easily explained. "A hallmark of civil liberties advocacy is that you often have one or more constitutional rights that are at issue and in tension on the same matters," Connell puts it. "Is it free speech if someone is advocating a hateful position? Some feel the government should be more aggressive in going after people who articulate hate speech. We take the position that the Constitution protects speech, but it doesn't protect violence."
The battle between abortion rights advocates and abortion clinic protestors found the ACLU, at differing times, on both sides. "Does a woman have access to a clinic? Can she get in and out?" Connell asks. But then, "Are those who are in opposition kept so far away as to render their protest meaningless? We look at the facts of each individual case, especially when there's a tension between two rights.
Infuriating everybody
"Ultimately, our clients," adds Connell, "are the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. That defense has led us to advance positions contrary to doctrinaire liberal thinking," including the famous 1978 defense of the Chicago Nazi Party's effort to march in Skokie. In the end, the ACLU infuriates almost everybody.
"For the most part, we protect minority interests," says Harvey Grossman, the avuncular head of the organization's local staff of eight lawyers and a 21-year Chicago ACLU veteran. "The Bill of Rights generally does too. They relieve individuals from oppression either from the majority or the government. By definition, we're either opposing the majority or the actions of a popularly elected official."
The headquarters for all this is a sprawling modern office suite taking up all of the 23rd floor of the skyscraper at 180 N. Michigan Ave., sporting beautiful views of the river and Wrigley Building, but little else in terms of amenities. The artwork consists mostly of framed ACLU posters, all adorning the front areas, leaving much of the long white hallways bare but for their occasional smudge marks. The main conference room features a large table surrounded by a dozen or so caramel-colored leather chairs and one out-of-place cloth burgundy one, much of the furniture donated by IBM.
At full force, the office here houses 24 workers (there are currently three vacancies), part of a national network with offices in every single state, most of them smaller than Chicago's. A single staff member divides time between two offices in South and North Dakota, Connell's native state.
Connell's corner office is spartanly furnished, too, graced by a sofa and a large table displaying photos of her husband and two children, ages 9 and 11. Above her desk rests a black-and-white photo of Martin Luther King Jr., a holdover from her predecessor, Jay Miller, who retired in his early 70s after two decades in the post. "Who could take down a picture of Martin Luther King?" she asks.
"And behind you are Justices William Brennan and Harry Blackmun," she informs her guest, although tellingly she means not their images but samples of their words. Also tellingly, a leather-bound copy of the Federalist papers lies on her desk.
This is an office bland and colorless on the surface, teeming with drama underneath. Connell herself is a case in point.
Scholarly appeal
Polite, reserved and cool in demeanor, she is someone you might assume was a court official or scholar. She and Yohnka have an ongoing debate about her use of such terms as "evisceration" and "inchoate" on TV appearances. Hers is not the personality of a firebrand radical, but someone who can wax about the beauties of constitutional law the way a Shakespearean scholar might rhapsodize about "The Tempest." For her, this is the stuff of poetry.
Her journey here sounds an unlikely one. "I grew up in Medora, [N. D.] a town with a population of 129, and that's with no zeroes," she says. She is the daughter of a businessman "who was committed to serving the community and social change" and a World War II-era feminist. She is descended from independent women on both sides; her paternal great-grandmother was the daughter of Wyoming's Pony Express station manager.
If she talks with the deliberate, logical cadence of someone used to writing legal briefs, that's because she is a veteran lawyer and was the organization's point person on reproductive rights before taking the top job.
Look, feel of a law office
"This looks and sounds a lot like a law office because that's basically what it is," she says. Workers here routinely come in, work on depositions or other legal documents and dash out to court appearances.
Cases range from the short-lived to one that is 10 years old. The latter was settled in the ACLU's favor, but it is still ongoing in terms of enforcement follow-up, involving state family services.
When the guest suggests that the office is something of a think tank, Connell argues, "We're an action tank."
They are also not-for-profit; for lunch, Connell meets with a funder, a representative with the Chicago Community Trust.
Staff members here also testify before state and federal legislative bodies, field questions from the editorial boards of both major daily newspapers and engage in all sorts of public dialogue, from e-mails to each other across the country to media releases churned out daily by Yohnka.
Today, for instance, he carries around a draft of a release about Springfield's anti-terrorism vote. At noon, during a hurried sandwich lunch in the conference room, the phone rings, and it's Mary Dixon, the chapter's Springfield-based lobbyist. The house has passed the bill by a vote of 106 for, 1 against and 7 present. "This is one of those where a lot of the legislators who voted for it congratulated Mary on what we did to get the bill changed," he says with a sigh.
Around that time, Connell gets a call from a U.S. House Judiciary Committee staff member; a congressman is coming to Chicago to meet on the issue of military tribunals. The ACLU gets a lot of behind-the-scenes respect from legislators not hinted at in the headlines. This has its cynical side. "Legislators have told me by voting for a bill we oppose they get certain constituents off their back, while they're reassured we'll sue and get the bill declared unconstitutional anyway," Connell says.
Around 5 p.m., Doris -- a pseudonym by her request ("I live in a bad neighborhood and I don't want certain neighbors knowing I'm not home all day") -- will turn off the reception lights and lock the front door, although like so much else that goes on here, that's not final. Everyone has his or her own key.
"We're never finished, we're never done," Connell says not of the day, but of all the issues they deal in. Then, she quotes Thomas Jefferson: "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
After Doris leaves, Yohnka and Connell remain at their terminals, their phones still ringing long after daylight.
"This is exhilarating work, and I don't mean, `Aren't I important? I defend the 1st Amendment,' " Connell says, visibly tiring as the afternoon wanes. "This is a privilege, and it's fun, to boot."
Copyright © 2001, Chicago Tribune
~p~
