Empty Suits: ACLU and Americans United

 

What is the meaning of the phrase, "Empty Suit?"

Generally, it is reserved to describe a person who may look potent, important or consequential, who is really effete, ineffective or simply cowardly.

For me, the classic use of the expression came when Jimmy McNulty ("The Wire") meets with federal officials from the FBI and the (Republican) Department of Justice, trying to enlist their help in bringing to heel the powerful, efficient and lethal drug mob he and his Baltimore Police Department have been struggling to contain. The federals are indifferent to a mob which simply pushes heroin, murders local citizens and controls the corners of a minor American city. What the feds want is to trap some corrupt (Democratic) elected officials and to prosecute them.

McNulty finally jumps to his feet in frustration and exclaims, "And here I thought you were real police! But no, just putting away an organization which has been destroying half of a city with murders, drugs and extortion isn't of interest to you. All you want is a few political pelts. You're not real police at all, just a bunch of empty suits!"

That contains all the meanings and nuances: the phony aspect of sworn officers who don't actually care about crime; the pretense of potency; the showy exterior covering a hollow interior. A suit of armor, with no knight inside it.

$250,000 

And that is what Mad Dog has found when he looked for help from the American Civil Liberties Union (New Hampshire) and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The CEO of Americans United gets over $250,000 a year to fight for the principle of church/state separation, and the CEO of the New Hampshire ACLU gets about $100,000 to fight for the First Amendment.

$100,000 looking for a rock to hide under

But neither was interested in fighting the good fight in Hampton, when the Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal church pushed through it's annual stipend/slush fund using the corrupt warrant article process in town.

What happens in Hampton is unique in America, as far as Mad Dog can tell. It is not like the case in Everson, where the courts found a town which says it wants to offer a service to all the town's children, namely busing them to school, then that town cannot refuse to bus children simply because they want to be bused to a Catholic school. It is not like Carson, where children who have been guaranteed by the state of Maine a free public education, are denied funds for the only school in their remote part of the state, a school which is a Christian Bible school. It is not like Espinosa, where Montana made voucher funds, underwritten by the taxpayer, available to church schools. In all these cases the state was offering to make funds available to all members of the public; in Hampton special funds are designated to a special group of children--those attending a Catholic church school.

In the case of Hampton, the parish congregation puts its request for $50,000 on a "warrant ballot" and uses its parishioners on the School Board and Budget Committee to vote to endorse this ballot initiative, endorsements which appear on the ballot, and almost assure passage in the voting, and they create a slush fund from which the SAU treasurer (a government employee) writes checks from the town account to cover invoices for computers and who knows what (?crucifixes molded of clay?) for the church school, a slush fund available only to those children who attend the church school, over and above what other town children have available to them.

This is straightforward establishment of a state church (i.e. funding a church with public funds) as clearly as has ever occurred for the Anglican church in England, or the German system of designating 3% of income tax from each member of any congregation.

The CEO of the New Hampshire ACLU reportedly has said, off the record, that those who have objected to this slush fund, to this violation of the First Amendment's guarantee against establishment of state religion are entirely correct, but it is simply not worth fighting this battle "given the current Supreme Court and the environment we have now."

Which is to say, we think we cannot slay this dragon, so we will simply cut and run.

The CEO of Americans United is even worse: she simply refuses to respond but she sends out weekly announcements about all the good work she does and asks for contributions. 

So we have not got warriors fighting the good fight. The days when the ACLU signed on to defend the right of Nazis to march in Skokie are long gone. That took real guts. The ACLU risked alienating its donor base. But it said, "If we are not going to defend the First Amendment for everyone, why do we defend it at all, for anyone?"