American Civil Liberties Union Legal Director - David Cole
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 2 November 2018
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
American politics in the era of President Donald Trump is a polarised, partisan arena. But still there are pillars of the US system of governance such as the constitution and the courts that are supposed to safeguard the liberty of all, irrespective of creed, colour or politics. HARDtalk’s Stephen Sackur speaks to David Cole, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union - the century-old guardian of citizen rights. Has the ACLU betrayed its mission by putting partisanship before principle in the age of Trump?
Image: David Cole (Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker. |
| 0:07.0 | Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it. Welcome to Hard Talk. I'm |
| 0:12.8 | Stephen Sacker. American politics in the era of Donald Trump is a polarized partisan bear pit. |
| 0:20.3 | But still, there are pillars of the U.S. system of governance, the Constitution, the courts, |
| 0:26.1 | which are supposed to safeguard the liberty of all, irrespective of creed, color or politics. |
| 0:32.6 | Well, my guest today is David Cole, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, the century-old |
| 0:39.5 | guardian of citizens' rights. Has the ACLU betrayed its mission by putting partisanship before |
| 0:48.1 | principle in the age of Trump? David Cole, welcome to Hard Talk. Thanks for having me. It seems quite clear that your |
| 0:55.8 | organization, the ACLU, has rebooted itself to maximize its impact in this era of Donald Trump. |
| 1:06.5 | What have you done and why? Well, I think the first thing that happened is that citizens throughout the United States, |
| 1:12.4 | concerned about President Trump's election, turned to us as the oldest and largest civil liberties |
| 1:20.2 | and civil rights organization in the United States and joined us in untold numbers. |
| 1:26.1 | So we had before President Trump was elected, 400,000 members. Today, |
| 1:31.2 | we're over 1.6 million members. We quadrupled our membership. And your revenues? And our |
| 1:37.3 | revenues. People, the members are giving us support, sometimes, you know, $25 a time, sometimes |
| 1:43.5 | much more than that. And so we have many more |
| 1:47.0 | resources to deploy, but precisely because there are so many more threats to respond to. And so we have, |
| 1:54.8 | as we told President Trump the week that he was elected, we'll see you in court if you put in place measures that we |
| 2:02.4 | think are unconstitutional. We'll challenge them in court. But you made it, I mean, as you've |
| 2:06.7 | just said, you made it very explicit, even before he'd taken office, after he'd won that November |
| 2:10.7 | election, you were quite plain that you were going to be taking Trump on. Right. This was |
| 2:16.4 | political for you from the very beginning. |
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