On Monday, the US Supreme Court ruled that ex-President Donald Trump enjoys ‘absolute immunity’ for ‘official acts’ as president, a ruling that at a stroke destroys the fiction of the US as a ‘democracy’ with no man or woman above the law.
In short, this ruling shreds the American Constitution which declared that there would no longer be a dictatorship by Kings but a free Republic where no one was above the law and its rulers were subject to the will of the people.
It now transpires that the role of President of the United States is now legally above the law and free to commit any crime, including killing any political opponent, with impunity.
This ruling by the right-wing majority six judges who control the court (most appointed by Trump himself) in the case of Trump v United States confers on Trump, and any past or future president, ‘absolute immunity’ for illegal or even treasonous actions carried out while in office.
Sonia Sotomayer, one of the three more liberal judges who dissented from this ruling, listed a number of the things a president can now legally do.
These include: ‘Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organise a military coup to hold on to power? Immune. Take a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune.’
Sotomayer concluded her dissenting document writing: ‘With fear for our democracy, I dissent.’
This is the depth of the destruction of bourgeois democracy in the US as it transforms into an open dictatorship with a supreme leader answerable only to the ruling capitalist class.
President Joe Biden’s response to this ruling was to denounce it as setting a ‘dangerous precedent’ and called for ‘the American people to render judgement on Donald Trump’s behaviour’ – presumably by voting for Biden in November’s presidential election.
What Biden didn’t call for is the US working class to rise up in defence of the Constitution and overturn this ruling.
In fact, Biden has been quite content to live with this right-wing cabal running the Supreme Court just as the Democratic Party has worked hand-in-hand with Republican representatives who openly supported the attempt by Trump followers to overturn the result of the last presidential election in a failed coup attempt.
Biden has no problem with having the powers of a dictator as long as Trump hasn’t got them.
Vladimir Lenin in 1918, immediately after he led the Russian revolution to victory, summed up the situation writing:
‘The ruling party in a bourgeois democracy extends the protection of the minority only to another bourgeois party, while the proletariat, on all serious, profound and fundamental issues, gets martial law or pogroms, instead of the “protection of the minority”.’
Crucially, Lenin continued: ‘The more highly developed a democracy is, the more imminent are pogroms or civil war in connection with any profound political divergence which is dangerous to the bourgeoisie.’ (Lenin ‘The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky’).
The ruling class in America are most certainly gripped by a crisis, as the once mighty US economy is drowning under a $33 trillion debt mountain while its attempts to impose its dictatorship on the world’s resources through war face defeats from Ukraine to the Middle East.
The world dominance of the dollar is under threat from rivals like China and Russia, while at home the working class, led by youth, are rising up against war and the massive poverty inflicted by a ruling class that wallows in luxury while millions live in poverty.
This crisis and the dangers it poses to the American bourgeoisie has accelerated the collapse of bourgeois democracy and the sharp turn to a dictatorship to wage a class war to the finish.
The US and international working class must take warning from this ruling.
With the most powerful capitalist nation in the world turning to naked dictatorship, the only way forward is for the working class to take action by seizing the power replacing the capitalist state with a workers’ state and socialism.
This demands the building throughout the working class in the US and the world of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International to provide the revolutionary leadership required for the victory of the worldwide socialist revolution.
