Sneaky language from the ACLU on yesterday’s passage of HR 2679
From the ACLU press release: ACLU Criticizes House Passage of “Public Expression of Religion Act,” Says Bill Weakens Individual Religious Freedom
WASHINGTON - The American Civil Liberties Union today condemned the House of Representatives for adopting H.R. 2679, the “Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005″ (PERA). The bill would bar the recovery of attorneys’ fees to citizens who win lawsuits asserting their fundamental constitutional and civil rights in cases brought under the First Amendment.
“The House has once again shown little regard for the Bill of Rights in voting to limit Americans’ ability to keep the government from intruding on religious expression,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “The bill’s supporters claim they are protecting religious freedom, when in fact this bill will undermine it. We are deeply dismayed that the House adopted this proposal and urge the Senate to reject this bill and protect the Constitution.”
The ability to recover attorneys’ fees in civil rights and constitutional cases, including Establishment Clause cases, is necessary to help protect the religious freedom of all Americans and to keep religion government-free. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment protects the religious liberty of all Americans.
People who successfully prove the government has violated their constitutional rights would, under the bill, be required to pay their own legal fees — often totaling tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Few citizens can afford to do so. But more importantly, citizens should not be required to do so where the court finds that the government has violated their rights and the Constitution.
To whom do attorneys fees go? Attorneys fees go to attorneys, not “citizens.” The ACLU’s disingenuousness oozes through this entire release. The fact is, this bill would cut them off from millions of dollars. Their lament about citizens being “required to pay their own legal fees” is phony to the nth degree. The ACLU invents many of these cases by finding an “offense” (like when they initiated a scavenger hunt to find religiously-themed monuments in Utah), then finding an “injured party,” then representing this client PRO BONO. So, of course, the ACLU is lying about citizen’s responsibility for any costs associated with the ridiculous cases the ACLU regularly burdens innocent communities with. Typically, there is no “injury” or government coercion of any sort, simply “offense” at the presence of some religious symbol on public grounds. Sometimes there’s not even that. The ACLU has abused the section of the US Code they have come to rely on as hammer on the taxpayer piggy bank and this resolution is a common sense response to that abuse. The statute was adopted to assist indigent citizens, not to further enrich the rich.
Under the law which would be amended by PERA should it pass the Senate, the ACLU may file suit after suit and even if it loses, the prevailing defendant may not recover attorneys fees or costs associated with the suit. So the ACLU could never lose and the resource-poor town or school stalked by the ACLU and its giant endowment could never win. How is this a level playing field? All this bill does is make it a fair fight — taking an arrow of intimidation from the ACLU’s bloody quiver and removing the greedy hand of the ACLU from your pocket and mine.
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