For ACLU’s Anthony Romero, These Should Be Best Times

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

For the American Civil Liberties Union and its executive director, Anthony Romero, these should be the best of times.

Fear of government excess in the war on terror has driven membership rolls to more than 550,000 from less than 300,000. Fund raising has surged, allowing the national office to double its staff and help each local affiliate hire a staff attorney.

“I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished,” Mr. Romero, 40, told The New York Sun. The Stanford-educated attorney and former Ford Foundation program director, who took the reins at the ACLU just a week before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, said he realized immediately that it was a critical moment for the organization. “We threw everything we had at it,” he said.

That has included legal challenges to government surveillance efforts, complaints filed with the United Nations “condemning” America for violating international human rights treaties, and a lawsuit that has forced the disclosure of more than 100,000 pages of government documents about alleged abuses of prisoners in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay.

“Part of the reason the climate’s changed has a lot to do with our success,” Mr. Romero said. “The organization has never been more vigorous, never been more effective, never been more tactical.”

Mr. Romero, a Bronx native, is the first Hispanic and the first openly gay person to hold the executive director’s job. However, he had little prior record of civil liberties activism and has been dogged by complaints that he is not sufficiently devoted to the ACLU’s core principles.

“He’s not a civil libertarian,” one of Mr. Romero’s most persistent critics, Michael Meyers of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, said. “He doesn’t have civil liberties in his bones. He’s a creature of the Ford Foundation. This guy acts just like a foundation executive.”

In 2004, Mr. Romero was faulted by the group’s board and many of its affiliates for signing an agreement to abide by a sanctions blacklist connected to the charitable donation program for federal employees, the Combined Federal Campaign. He also drew fire for agreeing to a Ford Foundation stipulation that grant recipients not “promote or engage in violence, terrorism or bigotry or the destruction of any state.”

More recently, the ACLU has drawn unwanted attention for considering proposals to bar board members from publicly expressing disagreement with the organization’s policies or disparaging the performance of its staff. At an ACLU meeting in April, Mr. Romero lashed out at a board member who has been openly critical of him, Wendy Kaminer, and chastised another board member for the expression on her face during his verbal fusillade. He later apologized.

Mr. Romero has acknowledged he erred in his handling of the federal charity campaign and the Ford Foundation restrictions, but he contends the group has benefited from his aggressive leadership.

“I believe in being hard-nosed. A good heart won’t get you there. I know I’ve ruffled feathers in some of the personnel decisions and policy decisions I’ve made,” Mr. Romero said. He points to his hiring of a former congressman who is a conservative Republican, Bob Barr of Georgia, to help the ACLU build conservative opposition to the Patriot Act.

“I had half of the Berkeley chapter in revolt,” Mr. Romero said with a laugh.

Some members have complained that the organization was surprisingly meek earlier this year as Islamic radicals used threats of violence to dissuade newspapers in Europe and America from publishing cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.

An author and former trustee of the ACLU’s Massachusetts affiliate, Richard Rosenfeld, said he urged national leaders of the organization to speak out. “Frankly, I got nowhere,” he said.

Mr. Romero told the Sun that the controversy was playing out overseas and that intervening would have constituted “very dangerous mission creep” for a group devoted to American civil liberties.

“Who was shutting down the Muslim cartoons? The Danish government. We don’t weigh in with the Mozambique government when it shuts down Mozambiquan newspapers,” he said.

Mr. Rosenfeld called that explanation “a ducking” and said the ACLU missed a teaching moment. “The truth is the chilling effect of these threats is everywhere. Those threats basically amended the First Amendment here,” he said. “That’s an act of terrorism.”

“The minute this became an issue for us, we jumped all over it,” Mr. Romero insisted, noting that he wrote the University of Illinois on February 17, objecting to the firing of editors of the campus newspaper after it printed some of the cartoons. The letter drew little attention and came 10 days after editors at the New York Press quit in a dispute they said was driven by their boss’s fears about printing the cartoons.

Mr. Rosenfeld said he worries that the episode signals a reticence driven by the ACLU’s financial and organizational growth. “As the ACLU becomes larger and wealthier and has more members, it tends to be more conservative and more interested in donations than in taking the stands that are necessary,” he said.

Mr. Romero has also struggled with the ACLU’s unwieldy board, which consists of 83 members, most of whom have an ingrained distrust of authority.

Two former members, Mr. Meyers and Ms. Kaminer, contend he attempted to purge them because they had repeatedly criticized his leadership.

The effort to impeach the pair was dropped, but morphed into a committee to define the duties of board members.

The proposals that emerged, which said board members could not criticize the ACLU’s officers or staff and should avoid disagreeing publicly with the organization, caused great consternation among some loyal members and have contributed to a nascent effort to change the leadership of the organization.

At a board meeting earlier this month, Mr. Romero spoke out against the proposals. However, some active members of the group assert his comments were driven not by principle, but a desire to head off another burgeoning controversy.

“They staged that,” a member of the Florida ACLU board, Richard Johnson said, noting that a New York Times reporter was invited to the session. “Anthony Romero came out and denounced it. It was all his idea to begin with.”

Mr. Romero told the Sun he did not review the controversial proposals in detail until recently.

The board returned the proposals to the committee for more work, but some members complained that they were kept in the dark about a phone call in which a lawyer from Attorney General Spitzer’s office voiced concerns about limiting speech by board members.

“If the board had been told the attorney general’s office was concerned about parts of this proposal, don’t you think the entire debate would have been different?” Ms. Kaminer, who left the board yesterday, said. “It would have been over.”

A member of the board’s executive committee, Michael Pheneger, acknowledged in an interview that there was a lengthy and heated discussion about whether to disclose the call to the full board immediately.

He said one factor behind the decision to delay was the fact that the Times reporter, Stephanie Strom, had been invited to the June 17 meeting where the proposals on board members’ speech were to be debated.

“We also knew the New York Times reporter was going to be there. The issue was did we intend to kick everyone out and go into executive session,” Mr. Pheneger said.

Even a private report to the board about the call could have led to the release of information subject to attorney-client privilege, he said.

Ms. Kaminer complained that public relations concerns were dictating the timing of disclosures to the board. “The full board had a clear right to this information,” she said.

Mr. Romero defended the decision to withhold the information from the larger board because the ACLU “heard from a lot of folks” about the proposals and there was no chance the board was going to pass the proposals at that session, or ever. “A lot of do was made about nothing,” he said.

Whatever storm clouds may be gathering, it is clear Mr. Romero still has his fans. “Mr. Anthony has vision and energy, he’s creative and he’s taken the organization in a very positive direction,” Mr. Pheneger said. “I think he has been a great leader. He has made some mistakes. Coming from the outside, he has no clue of the quirkiness of the organization and the organizational culture out there.”

While the stakes for the organization are high, the dispute between Mr. Romero and his detractors has had its lighter moments. Mr. Meyers told a reporter that during several meetings the ACLU leader declared that Mr. Meyers and other critics could “kiss my Hispanic ass.”

“I think it was, ‘Kiss my Puerto Rican ass,” Mr. Romero said matter-of-factly when asked about the quote. “I believe in being a consumer of the First Amendment as well as a defender of it.”


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