September, 15 2017, 12:45pm EDT
ACLU to Grant Awards to Standing Rock Tribe Chairman and Lakota Water Protector for Protest Against Pipeline, and Constitutional Law Professor
This month the American Civil Liberties Union will award its highest honors, the Roger N. Baldwin Medal of Liberty, to Dave Archambault II and Regina Brave, and the Dorsen Presidential Prize in Academia, to Professor David Goldberger. Both awards will be granted at the organization's upcoming Biennial Leadership Conference on September 16th in Denver, Colorado.
NEW YORK
This month the American Civil Liberties Union will award its highest honors, the Roger N. Baldwin Medal of Liberty, to Dave Archambault II and Regina Brave, and the Dorsen Presidential Prize in Academia, to Professor David Goldberger. Both awards will be granted at the organization's upcoming Biennial Leadership Conference on September 16th in Denver, Colorado.
Dave Archambault II and Regina Brave are the 2017 recipients of the Medal of Liberty. Archambault is the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and Brave is a water protector and member of the Lakota Tribe. Both are being honored for their leadership in the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline on behalf of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and all Indigenous People.
The ACLU awards the Roger N. Baldwin Medal of Liberty biannually to recognize exceptional contributions to civil liberties. Established in 1989, the award honors Roger N. Baldwin, one of the ACLU's principal organizers in 1919 and 1920. The Baldwin Medal of Liberty comes with a financial stipend of $30,000, split evenly between the recipients.
In addition to the Medal of Liberty, the ACLU will award the Dorsen Presidential Prize to David Goldberger, professor emeritus of law at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. The 2017 Dorsen Prize will be presented to Goldberger for his celebrated work as an author and academic for over 50 years, particularly on the subject of constitutional rights and the protection of free speech and the right to assemble. Prior to his career as an academic, Goldberger was the Legal and Legislative Director of the ACLU of Illinois where he brought the highly recognized First Amendment case, National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, to the US Supreme Court.
The Dorsen Presidential Prize awards full-time academic scholars for outstanding lifetime contributions to civil liberties. The award was established in 2013 to honor former professor of law and ACLU president Norman Dorsen, who served from 1976-1991 and recently passed away in July. The Dorsen Presidential Prize comes with a financial stipend of $10,000.
The 2017 awards selection committee met this past spring to choose this year's honorees, and included the following members: ACLU president Susan Herman, Goldman Sachs trustee Diana Daniels, writer and activist Larry Siems, former ACLU board member Philippa Strum, and Ms. Foundation for Women president and CEO Teresa Younger.
Before Dorsen passed away on July 1, he participated in the selection committee's meeting to select the 2017 honorees, his last ACLU meeting after a lifetime of extraordinary service in civil liberties.
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
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Call What's Coming the 'Donald J. Trump Recession,' Says Economist
"While a recession may not be fully baked into the cards at this point, the risk is evident and it's almost entirely coming from Donald Trump's policies."
Mar 10, 2025
As U.S. financial markets continued their downward spiral on Monday amid rapidly mounting concerns about the impacts of President Donald Trump's erratic and destructive tariff policies, one economist argued that the president has almost single-handedly engineered economic conditions that could result in a recession in the near future.
"Past recessions have been the result of policy errors or disasters," Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote Monday. "The most typical policy error is when the Federal Reserve Board raises interest rates too much to counter inflation. That was clearly the story in the 1974-75 recession as well as the 1980-82 double-dip recession."
"Then we have recessions caused by collapsing financial bubbles, the 2001 recession following the collapse of the stock bubble and the 2008-09 recession following the collapse of the housing bubble. And of course, we had the 2020 recession because of the Covid pandemic," he added. "But now Donald Trump is threatening us with a recession, not because of something that is any way unavoidable, but rather because as president he has the power to bring on a recession."
Baker pointed specifically to Trump's decision to impose sweeping tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China, which the economist estimates will cost Americans roughly $2,000 per household as companies push the costs of the tariffs onto consumers in the form of higher prices.
Trump is going to give us a recession, because he can cepr.net/publications...
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— Dean Baker (@deanbaker13.bsky.social) March 10, 2025 at 12:04 PM
Retaliatory measures are also likely to inflict pain on Americans: On Monday, Ontario announced it would charge 25% more for the electricity it provides to Minnesota, New York, and Michigan in response to Trump's tariffs on Canadian imports, a move that's expected to hike electricity bills significantly for ratepayers in those states.
China, meanwhile, hit back at Trump Monday with an additional 15% tariff on U.S. farm products, including chicken, pork, soybeans, and beef.
Trump's tariff policies, and the widespread confusion surrounding their implementation, have sparked a sell-off on Wall Street and broader fears about the state of the U.S. economy as the labor market shows signs of stalling and consumer confidence plunges.
"While a recession may not be fully baked into the cards at this point, the risk is evident and it's almost entirely coming from Donald Trump's policies," Baker argued, noting that while the recession threat is "first and foremost" driven by tariffs, they "are just one possible route."
"The other is Elon Musk's DOGE team attack on the government. If there was ever any doubt, it is now clear that this outfit has nothing to do with increasing government efficiency," Baker wrote. "The direct impact of Musk's job cuts on both the budget and the economy is likely to be small. The bigger impact is the uncertainty they have created in large sectors of the economy."
"In short, Donald Trump has good reasons for telling us that his MAGA policies might give us a recession," he added. "It's hard to know how bad this recession would be, but it will definitely be the 'Donald J. Trump recession.'"
"Will the Trump slump turn into a recession? How will Trump lie and cheat his way out of it? Stay tuned."
Baker's assessment came a day after Trump declined to rule out the possibility of an economic recession in the U.S. this year and downplayed the effects of his tariffs, claiming without a shred of evidence that they will make the country "so rich you're not going to know where to spend all that money."
Trump previously insisted that the U.S. stock sell-off was attributable not to his chaotic tariff announcements, but to "globalists that see how rich our country is going to be and they don't like it."
Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote Monday that just seven weeks after Trump's inauguration, "the bottom is falling out" of the U.S. economy.
"Stocks are plunging. Treasury yields are falling. Consumer confidence is dropping. Inflation is picking up," Reich wrote. "The cost of living—the single biggest problem identified by consumers over the last several years—is going up, not down. Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminum, and his threatened 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, are playing havoc with supply chains inside and outside America."
"Even before this Trump slump, only the richest 10% of Americans had enough purchasing power to keep the economy going with their spending. The bottom 90%—including most Trump voters—were barely getting by. The next eighteen months could be rough on millions of people," he continued. "Will the Trump slump turn into a recession? How will Trump lie and cheat his way out of it? Stay tuned."
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Trump EPA and Citibank Sued for 'Illegally' Freezing Green Energy Funds
"This program was designed to save money for hard-working Americans who are struggling to pay for groceries and keep the lights on," said the head of a climate group that had been awarded funds to finance green energy expansion.
Mar 10, 2025
The need for a federal lawsuit filed Monday presents "more evidence of a constitutional crisis," according to one campaigner, as plaintiffs pushed back against the Trump administration's unlawful freezing of funds appropriated by Congress to help fuel a green energy transition in marginalized communities nationwide.
The lawsuit was announced Saturday by Climate United Fund, a nonprofit green investment fund, and was received Monday by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who previously presided over President Donald Trump's criminal trial regarding his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
The group is accusing the Environmental Protection Agency and Citibank of "illegally withholding" $7 billion that had been awarded to Climate United through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which set up a $20 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, also known as the Green Bank.
The Green Bank was established to fund solar power, energy-efficient housing projects, and electric vehicles. Climate United has reported that it used funds to begin pre-construction on a solar energy project across the University of Arkansas system, invest in electric trucks at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach with plans for nationwide expansion, and launch a grant program for low-income communities to start clean energy projects.
For the last two weeks, The New York Times reported, Climate United and seven other nonprofits that were awarded funding through the Green Bank have been unable to withdraw the money from their accounts at Citibank.
"They have essentially acted as if they control the power of the purse, but very clearly written into the Constitution is the separation of powers that grants Congress and Congress alone the power of making funding decisions."
The Times reported that the EPA appeared to have frozen the funds after EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called for a "termination" of the agreement the Biden administration made with Citibank when the money was allocated to the nonprofits.
Zeldin made that demand last month after the right-wing group Project Veritas, released a hidden-camera video in which it had surreptitiously recorded an EPA employee saying before Trump took office that the agency was attempting to spend federal money on climate programs before the Republican president was inaugurated.
Zeldin suggested the comments signaled the Green Bank was "designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight" and was "irresponsibly shoveling boat loads of cash to far-left, activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity."
Climate United and the other groups impacted by the funding freeze have been struggling to pay their staff, the Times reported.
"This isn't about politics; it's about economics," said Beth Bafford, CEO of Climate United. "This program was designed to save money for hard-working Americans who are struggling to pay for groceries and keep the lights on. We're going to court for the communities we serve—not because we want to, but because we have to."
In his statement about the Green Bank funding last month, Zeldin said he was referring the matter to the Office of the Inspector General, suggesting an accusation of potential fraud.
Days after Zeldin's directive, federal prosecutor Denise Cheung resigned after declining to freeze an unidentified bank's accounts for a government contractor, saying she had not found "sufficient evidence" of criminal activity. Cheung's resignation is believed to have stemmed from Zeldin's accusations regarding the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
In an interview with "Living on Earth" on Public Radio Exchange last month, Jillian Blanchard, vice president of climate change and environmental justice at Lawyers for Good Government, said Zeldin's push to claw back $20 billion that was awarded last year through legislation passed by Congress suggests that "this executive [branch] seems to believe that they have and should have more power than both Congress and the courts."
"They have essentially acted as if they control the power of the purse, but very clearly written into the Constitution is the separation of powers that grants Congress and Congress alone the power of making funding decisions," said Blanchard.
The Trump administration has already been blocked from freezing funds that were were appropriated by Congress. In January the president moved to block federal grants and loans in an order that was swiftly blocked by federal courts, with one judge saying the funding freeze was "likely unconstitutional."
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'Unparalleled Attack on the Rule of Law' by Trump Puts US on Global Watchlist
"The Trump administration seems hellbent on dismantling the system of checks and balances which are the pillars of a democratic society," said one senior leader with the group CIVICUS.
Mar 10, 2025
An organization that tracks threats to civic freedoms announced Monday that it has added the United States to its watchlist, citing the Trump administration's "unprecedented" executive orders that the group says undermine democratic institutions, rule of law, and global cooperation.
"The Trump administration seems hellbent on dismantling the system of checks and balances which are the pillars of a democratic society," said Mandeep Tiwana, interim co-secretary general of CIVICUS, a global alliance of civil society activists and organizations, in a statement Monday.
"This is an unparalleled attack on the rule of law in the United States, not seen since the days of McCarthyism in the twentieth century. Restrictive executive orders, unjustifiable institutional cutbacks, and intimidation tactics through threatening pronouncements by senior officials in the administration are creating an atmosphere to chill democratic dissent, a cherished American ideal," Tiwana continued.
The CIVICUS Monitor Watchlist, which highlights countries where there is a serious decline in "respect for civic space," also noted declines in the status of four other countries on Monday: Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italy, Pakistan, and Serbia. Democratic Republic of the Congo and Pakistan earned a rating of "repressed," while the watchlist considers the civic space rating of Italy and the United States to be "narrowed." Serbia earned the civic space rating of "obstructed."
"Open" is the highest ranking a country can receive, and denotes when "citizens and civil society organizations are able to organize, participate, and communicate without hindrance."
"Narrowed" is the second-highest tier rating, and countries earn this designation when people can exercise civic freedoms, including the freedoms of association, peaceful assembly, and expression, though occasionally violations of these rights occur.
Following his return to the White House, "Trump has issued at least 125 executive orders, dismantling federal policies with profound implications for human rights and the rule of law," according to the group.
Other actions that CIVICUS Monitor Watchlist highlights include: rolling back federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, implementing a widespread pause on foreign aid, taking steps to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and laying off employees there, and withdrawing from the World Health Organization, the U.N. Human Rights Council, and the Paris Climate Agreement.
"These measures come amid a broader potential curb on the freedom of association," according to the group, which points to the passage of the so-called "nonprofit killer" bill in the U.S. House of Representatives in November, 2024. If it became law, the bill would allow the Treasury Department to revoke the tax-exempt status of non-profits it deems to be supporting terrorism.
The group points to Trump's January 30 executive order which is purportedly aimed at combating antisemitism. In an accompanying fact sheet with the order, Trump is quoted saying: "To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before."
Critics had warned that the executive order could chill political speech on campuses, according to The Guardian, and it is freshly in the news after Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who helped lead the Gaza solidarity encampment on Columbia University's campus.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said described Khalil's arrest as being "in support of President Trump's executive orders prohibiting antisemitism," according to The Associated Press.
The group also highlighted recent actions that touch on press freedom concerns. For example, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced in February that the administration will now decide which outlets get to participate in the presidential press pool, in a break with precedent.
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