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Norman Thomas
Born
In 1942 most American liberals, and a majority of the American Civil Liberties Union's national board, accepted Roosevelt's order removing Japanese Americans from the West Coast as a wartime necessity. Thomas, the Socialist Party leader and a long-serving ACLU board member, refused. He opposed the board's decision not to challenge the order head-on and published the pamphlet Democracy and Japanese Americans that year, calling the removal a betrayal of the principles the war was meant to defend. The Supreme Court upheld the exclusion in Korematsu in 1944; Congress apologised in 1988.
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Ralph Lawrence Carr
Born
Colorado's Republican governor was almost alone among Western officials in 1942 in saying publicly that Japanese Americans were citizens with the same rights as anyone else. While other governors refused to accept evacuees, Carr told his own voters and party that Colorado would take them and that "if you harm them, you must harm me". He complied with the federal camp at Amache but argued against detaining loyal citizens. The stance was widely blamed for his narrow defeat in that year's Senate race, and it ended his elected career. Colorado has since named its state judicial centre after him.
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Margaret Chase Smith
Born
On 1 June 1950, four months after Joseph McCarthy's Wheeling speech, Smith became the first Republican senator to condemn her fellow Republican on the Senate floor. Her "Declaration of Conscience", co-signed by six other Republicans, defended "the right to criticize, the right to hold unpopular beliefs, the right to protest" and warned against riding to victory on "fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear". She was also critical of the Truman administration in the same speech, which is the point: her objection was to the method, whoever used it. McCarthy retaliated, and it took four more years for the Senate to censure him.
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Helen Suzman
Born
For 13 years from 1961 Suzman was the only Progressive Party member of South Africa's whites-only parliament, elected by affluent white voters in Houghton and spending her time attacking the laws most of them benefited from. She was the lone vote against the 1963 law allowing 90 days' detention without trial, used her right as an MP to visit prisons including Robben Island, and put detainees' treatment on the record. She also drew criticism from the anti-apartheid movement for opposing economic sanctions, and after 1994 she criticised the ANC government on rights as readily as she had the National Party.
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Andrei Sakharov
Born
Few people had more reason to stay loyal: Sakharov was a principal designer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, three times a Hero of Socialist Labour and a full member of the Academy of Sciences. In 1968 he circulated an essay arguing that intellectual freedom was essential to humanity's survival, lost his weapons work, and spent the next two decades defending dissidents, standing outside their trials and going on hunger strike. He was exiled to Gorky in 1980 after condemning the invasion of Afghanistan. Freed by Gorbachev in 1986, he went on to criticise Gorbachev too, from the floor of the new Congress of People's Deputies.
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Frank Church
Born
Watergate made it easy for a Democrat to investigate a Republican White House. What Church's Senate committee did in 1975 and 1976 was harder: it documented decades of abuses by the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency under presidents of both parties, including the FBI's campaign against Martin Luther King and CIA assassination plots under Eisenhower and Kennedy, a Democratic icon. Church called the NSA's capabilities a potential "abyss from which there is no return". The committee's work led directly to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and permanent congressional intelligence committees.
More about Frank Church7
Aryeh Neier
Born
Neier was born in Berlin in 1937 and escaped Nazi Germany as a child; many of his relatives did not. As executive director of the ACLU in 1977 he defended the right of a neo-Nazi group to march in Skokie, Illinois, a town with many Holocaust survivors. Around 30,000 members resigned and the organisation's finances were badly hit. The courts sided with the marchers' right to demonstrate. His book Defending My Enemy explains the reasoning: a rule that lets the state ban hateful speech will be used against the people he cared about. He went on to lead Human Rights Watch and the Open Society Foundations.
More about Aryeh Neier8
Nat Hentoff
Born
Hentoff spent half a century as a columnist for The Village Voice, a jazz critic and a self-described "Jewish atheist civil libertarian", and he lost friends on the left with regularity. He attacked campus speech codes in the 1980s and 1990s, defended the speech rights of people he despised, and broke with most of his colleagues by opposing abortion and euthanasia on grounds he described as consistent with his defence of life and liberty. He then criticised George W. Bush's surveillance and detention policies and Obama's continuation of them just as fiercely. His book Free Speech for Me, but Not for Thee is the place to start.
More about Nat Hentoff9
Sergei Kovalev
Born
A biologist who served ten years in Soviet camps and exile for documenting human rights abuses, Kovalev became a Yeltsin ally after 1991 and Russia's first human rights commissioner. When Yeltsin sent the army into Chechnya in December 1994, Kovalev went to Grozny, stayed through the bombardment and reported civilian deaths to Russian and foreign media. The Duma removed him as commissioner in 1995, and in 1996 he resigned from Yeltsin's human rights commission with an open letter accusing the president of abandoning democracy. He later opposed Putin's Chechen war on the same grounds.
More about Sergei Kovalev10
Nadine Strossen
Born
Strossen, the ACLU's first woman president, from 1991 to 2008, took on fellow feminists in 1995 with Defending Pornography, arguing against the anti-pornography ordinances promoted by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin on the grounds that censorship laws are most often turned on women and sexual minorities. In her 2018 book Hate she made a similar case against hate-speech bans, by then a popular cause on the progressive left. She has since criticised the organisation she once led for stepping back from defending speech its own supporters dislike.
More about Nadine Strossen11
Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger
Born
Germany's Free Democrat justice minister resigned in January 1996 after her own party's members voted in a ballot to back the "great eavesdropping operation", constitutional changes allowing police to bug private homes. She then joined fellow liberals Gerhart Baum and Burkhard Hirsch in a constitutional complaint, and in 2004 the Federal Constitutional Court struck down large parts of the law. Back as justice minister under Angela Merkel from 2009 to 2013, she blocked her coalition partners' plans to reintroduce blanket data retention. Two terms in office, the same position, against two different sets of allies.
More about Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger12
Russ Feingold
Born
Six weeks after the September 11 attacks, the Senate passed the USA PATRIOT Act by 98 votes to one. The one was Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, who argued on the floor that preserving liberty was the test of whether the attackers had won, and objected in particular to expanded secret searches and access to records. Most of his own party voted yes. He kept opposing renewals when Democrats controlled Congress and the White House, arguing against extending key provisions in 2009 and 2010. Earlier that same year, 2001, he had been the only Judiciary Committee Democrat to vote to confirm John Ashcroft, on the principle that presidents choose their cabinets.
More about Russ Feingold13
Helena Kennedy, Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
Born
Tony Blair made Kennedy, a leading criminal barrister, a Labour peer in 1997. She then spent much of the next decade voting and campaigning against his government's justice measures: plans to curb jury trials, identity cards, control orders and the extension of detention without charge for terror suspects. Her book Just Law, published in 2004, set out the case from inside the party, arguing that Labour was trading away protections its own supporters would one day need. The government lost several of these fights in the Lords, and she stayed in the party throughout, arguing from the benches behind her own ministers.
More about Helena Kennedy, Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws14
Petro Georgiou
Born
Georgiou, the Liberal member for Kooyong in Melbourne, was a former party director and adviser to Malcolm Fraser, not a natural rebel. In 2005 he and a small group of Liberal backbenchers drafted private member's bills against John Howard's mandatory detention policy and used the threat to win the release of children and many long-term detainees from detention centres. In 2006 he crossed the floor against his own government's bill to process all boat arrivals offshore, which was then withdrawn, and he also pressed for safeguards in the anti-terror laws of 2005. He left Parliament in 2010.
More about Petro Georgiou15
Floyd Abrams
Born
Abrams was co-counsel for The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case of 1971, which made him a hero to liberal America. He then spent decades taking First Amendment positions that dismayed many of the same people: he argued for Senator Mitch McConnell against the McCain–Feingold campaign finance law and supported the Citizens United side in 2009, holding that spending on political speech is speech. He also represented journalists, including Judith Miller in 2005, who refused to name their sources. His book The Soul of the First Amendment is a compact statement of the near-absolutist view, and a good test of whether you hold it.
More about Floyd Abrams16
David Davis (British politician)
Born
Davis is best known for resigning his Commons seat in 2008 to fight a by-election on Labour's plan for 42 days' detention without charge, a gesture against the other side. The stronger evidence came later. In 2014 he joined Labour's Tom Watson in a legal challenge to the data retention law rushed through by his own Conservative-led government; the European Court of Justice later ruled against that kind of general data retention. As a backbencher he went on to oppose Conservative governments on police use of live facial recognition and on emergency coronavirus powers, usually from his own party's benches and often with few allies.
More about David Davis (British politician)17
Ron Wyden
Born
As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wyden knew what the Obama administration's secret legal interpretations allowed but could not say it. In 2011 he warned that Americans would be "stunned" when they learned how the government read the Patriot Act, and in March 2013 he asked the Director of National Intelligence in open hearing whether the NSA collected data on millions of Americans. The answer, "No, sir", was shown to be false three months later by the Snowden documents. The Oregon Democrat has pressed administrations of both parties on surveillance before and since, using the narrow space secrecy rules leave him.
More about Ron Wyden18
Justin Amash
Born
A libertarian-leaning Republican from Michigan, Amash co-sponsored with Democrat John Conyers the July 2013 amendment to defund the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone records, weeks after the Snowden disclosures. It was opposed by his own party's House leadership and by the Obama White House, and failed by just 205 votes to 217, the closest Congress had come to curbing the programme. He kept voting against surveillance renewals under Trump, and in 2019 left the Republican Party after saying the president had engaged in impeachable conduct. He explained every vote publicly, which makes his record easy to check.
More about Justin Amash
