Some "left-leaning" stances they take where I'm hard-pressed to see how they are defending civil rights, if not outright violating those of one party for the benefit of another:
religious liberty (an employer engages in voluntary exchange... not much of a stretch to see it as a violation of rights to force them to pay for something which they consider blasphemous): https://action.aclu.org/secure/your-boss-has-no-business-you...
abortion (Roe v Wade federal overreach vs States' Rights... this and other issues like marijuana laws can be left to the States but "leftists" generally prefer a stronger central government over States as "laboratories of democracy"): https://www.aclu.org/issues/reproductive-freedom/abortion
ACA/"Obamacare": I couldn't find anything about their position on this issue but, if they were only defending civil rights rather than also being a "left-leaning political organization", I think they'd actively oppose forcing people to pay corporations for products they don't want.
Regarding voter ID. "All those other countries" generally uniformly issue IDs to everyone, so there's no issue like there is here in US, where there are significant minorities that don't have any form of ID. For example, I'm from Russia, and I have the government-issued ID that I need to show to vote; but that ID was issued to me for free (and is in fact mandatory to have).
A voter ID is not discriminatory in principle, provided that it's free (since otherwise it'd be a poll tax), and does not place undue burden on the citizen to obtain - like, say, traveling several hours to the only nearby place that issues them, and then waiting for several more hours in a line because it's understaffed to serve all the people that need to get their IDs from it.
The problem is that pretty much all voter ID laws promoted or passed in US to date fail these requirements, and thus effectively constitute voter suppression.
I feel like you could have a good argument about most of those, but the affirmative action one is pretty damning. That's blatantly political and in no way related to constitutional protections.
There are plenty of good civil liberties related ways to look at race, but affirmative action is not one of them.
I agree that "a good argument" can be made about some of them but it appears to me that ACLU always goes "left" with such nuanced issues. If I knew of examples of them going "right" to balance things out, I'd see them differently.
For example, I tried to find out if they took a position in Kelo v City of New London to defend property rights but my searches came up empty.
The supreme court agrees that affirmative action is constitutional (within certain bounds), see the recent Fisher v. UT case, or Bakke for the original example.
I'm not saying it's not constitutional, just that it is unrelated to civil liberties and should probably be outside their purview if they're to be a politically neutral organization.
On the subject of abortion and drugs, it's fairly straightforward. ACLU is not a "states' rights" organization. It is an "individual rights" organization. It sues states for infringing people's rights as much as it sues the feds. So from their perspective, if they can enshrine the protection of a right at a federal level, they'll go for it, because it's easier than forcing all 50 states to do the same.
Yes, it may be "easier" for the ACLU to abuse/"reinterpret" the Constitution rather than work to amend it or work within its strict framework... but doing so makes things worse for more people in the longterm.
States' Rights limit the Federal Government from being so powerful that it can more easily violate civil rights... a bigger picture which ACLU should take into account.
Likewise, "legislating from the bench" may have protected some rights of individuals... but, far more often, it has "enshrined", as you say, new Federal powers at the cost of individual liberties.
Most work that ACLU does on the federal level involves strengthening the 14th Amendment, such that it is the judicial branch of the federal government that grows stronger, specifically with respect to its power to limit infringement of individual rights by the states. That's narrow enough in scope to not be worrisome.
Cause states rights weren't used to shield Jim Crow for a hundred years... oh, right. States just as easily trample individual rights as the federal government.
