Civil Liberties on the Midterm Ballot

The ACLU has more than 100 years’ experience holding power accountable. As President Donald Trump rolls out his key nominations, we analyze how his nominee for assistant attorney general for civil rights will impact civil liberties.

To resist the Trump administrations’ attacks on our rights, local lawmakers across the country are protecting LGBTQ people, immigrants and reproductive health.

This case asks whether the state can arrest, charge, and convict someone under Montana’s obstruction statute for exercising their federal and state constitutional right to record police officers in public spaces. The defendant was filming a traffic stop when police instructed him to move farther away. When he did not move as far as they wanted, they arrested him for obstructing a peace officer. The ACLU’s State Supreme Court Initiative, along with the ACLU of Montana, filed an amicus brief in support of the defendant arguing that the officer’s refusal to allow the defendant to peacefully record police activity from a public sidewalk was, in effect, a content-based restriction on speech that could not be justified under strict scrutiny. Even if the restriction was not content-based, our brief argues that it is not a reasonable time place or manner restriction.

Donald Trump's attempts to withhold vital funding to bully and coerce states into compliance is plainly unconstitutional.