The Koch brothers gave $20 million to the ACLU to fight the Patriot Act, but only $43,000 to Scott Walker’s $11 million campaign for governor of Wisconsin. Now, these libertarian brothers who support drug legalization and cuts in defense spending have been falsely branded as the puppetmasters behind Walker and Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. (The Kochs have never met or spoken with Walker. They’re Libertarians, not conservatives. One of the Koch brothers was the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential nominee in 1980, running against Reagan).
Leading the charge to vilify the Kochs is the Alliance for Justice, which is headed by Nan Aron, a former ACLU staff attorney; the Alliance for Justice is a coalition partner of the ACLU. Along with the ACLU and Common Cause, the Alliance for Justice recently helped organize a “protest action” against the Kochs, at which demonstrators called for the lynching of Clarence Thomas.
As a writer noted at Huffington Post, “the groups involved in” that protest “action” included “Common Cause,” the “ACLU,” and the “Alliance for Justice.” The protest was part of a vilification campaign against the Kochs that included a presentation that characterized “the Kochs” as a “Threat to Our Democracy.”
The ACLU is immeasurably richer thanks to the Kochs’ contributions. Given their passionate opposition to the Patriot Act, the ACLU and its allies would have waged the same fight against the law if the Kochs had never given it a dime, leaving them $20 million poorer. That would have left them with less money to vilify the Kochs, and less money to push the ACLU’s other pet causes, like supporting racial preferences in cases like Gratz v. Bollinger, and arguing that voter-approved limits on racial quotas are unconstitutional. The ACLU, Common Cause, and the ACLU are all funded by many of the same left-wing donors, like George Soros.
The irony is that if the Kochs had given their $20 million to a conservative foundation rather than the ACLU, it might have had the resources to mount a PR defense of the Kochs when they came under attack. Conservative think-tanks are tiny compared to liberal ones. For example, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is relatively large for a conservative think-tank, has an annual budget of only $3 million, compared with $27 million for the liberal Center for American Progress in 2008 soon after its founding (when it was smaller than it is today).
I have libertarian leanings myself, and I’ve criticized the wisdom of several Patriot Act provisions, and the constitutionality of one of them. But compared to other pressing civil-liberties issues, the Patriot Act is truly a bottom-drawer issue. Given the fungibility of money, the Kochs’ donation to the ACLU may well have backfired on them.
It may also have left the ACLU with more money left over to spend attacking the civil liberties of groups like small businesses and Evangelical Christians. Contrary to its name, the ACLU sometimes opposes civil liberties, supporting curbs on the free speech rights of private religious employers in the Meltebeke case, and restrictions on the free association rights of business owners: it once sued a California restaurant to force it to serve neo-Nazis wearing swastikas, as George Mason University law professor David Bernstein has noted.
The Kochs have given millions to political causes, but this is dwarfed by the $600 million they have donated to non-political charities like the arts and medical research. They seem to be opposed to Obama partly because of his support for corporate welfare for the Kochs’ competitors, and Obama’s record-setting deficit spending, which the Kochs view as a long-run threat to the country’s financial stability and thus their own businesses. (Charles G. Koch elaborated on this recently in the Wall Street Journal).
The Kochs have good reason to be concerned. Obama’s record-setting deficits ran up more national debt in just one month in 2010 than Bush ran up in all of 2007. And as the Washington Examiner’s Timothy P. Carney has noted in column after column, the Obama Administration has frequently engaged in crony capitalism and corporate welfare that enriches well-connected businesses at the expense of competing businesses and the public. (Examples include ethanol subsidies, which the Kochs oppose; green-jobs subsidies that wipe out and outsource American jobs; and proposed giveaways of pollution rights to favored corporations).
