A growing series of lawsuits that challenge constitutional protections needed by working people are proceeding against Donald Trump. They’re scheduled to be heard between now and the 2024 election. Among the cases are lawsuits seeking to get the Republican front-runner thrown off the ballot in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and elsewhere, based on Section 3 of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
That post-Civil War Reconstruction-era provision was passed to bar Confederate politicians and military veterans who had declared war on the North from getting on the ballot.
On top of these brazen attempts to bar the Democrats’ main political opponent from running, President Joseph Biden’s Justice Department has cooked up a series of federal charges to try to throw Trump in prison. Special counsel Jack Smith is prosecuting the former president on charges of interfering with the count of the 2020 election, and for alleged violations of the witch hunt era Espionage Act. Additional civil cases in New York, charging him with business fraud and for making hush money payments to cover up sexual escapades, as well as racketeering conspiracy charges in Georgia, are all getting underway.
A total of 91 felony counts have been filed, overwhelmingly by Trump-hating Democratic politicians, cheered on by the liberal press and the Stalinist-minded middle-class left. They consider dangerous anyone who might vote for Trump, including tens of millions of working people. Basic freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution must be tossed aside, in their view, to prevent “semi-fascists,” as Biden called Trump’s supporters, from having a say at the ballot box.
Any attempt by one of the bosses’ two parties to use the FBI and the courts to criminalize political differences with the other sets a dangerous precedent for workers. Similar and far worse will be used against us when our class acts independently of the bosses and their two main parties. Already onerous petitioning requirements are used in most states to try to keep the Socialist Workers Party and others off the ballot.
The U.S. Supreme Court let stand a law passed by the Democratic majority in the New York legislature that tripled petition requirements for new parties.
Fighting against Democrats’ assaults on constitutional freedoms has nothing to do with supporting Trump’s political views. He’s a bourgeois politician, advocating his plans to prop up capitalist rule.
State courts hear anti-Trump probes
Minnesota Chief Justice Natalie E. Hudson threw out one of the Reconstruction-era insurrection cases against Trump Nov. 8. “There is no state statute that prohibits a major political party from placing on the presidential nomination primary ballot, or sending delegates to the national convention supporting, a candidate who is ineligible to hold office,” she wrote.
But the same day District Court Judge Sarah B. Wallace in Colorado refused Trump’s motion to dismiss a similar case there.
“When it comes to decide who goes on the ballot, the people decide, not six voters in Colorado,” Trump attorney Scott Gessler told the court, referring to the six plaintiffs who brought the case to ban Trump from the state’s 2024 ballot. Attacking free speech, his accusers claim his call to “fight” to overturn the 2020 vote count amounted to “insurrection.”
“None of President Trump’s words were a call to violence,” Gessler said. “‘Fight’ is a common, common, political metaphor meaning a political fight.”
These state cases and the coverage of them in the liberal press call what took place on Jan. 6, 2021, an “insurrection.” The Biden administration has since carried out a relentless FBI spy operation against participants in the pro-Trump rally and ensuing melee; prosecuted over 1,100 people; forced hundreds of plea deals; got convictions on thought-control seditious conspiracy charges, based largely on the provocations by FBI informants; and conducted a monthslong congressional show trial last year.
Despite all this, the administration has been unable to uncover anything remotely resembling an insurrection, no matter how many times the liberal media throws that word around.
On the eve of the second imperialist world war, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration charged 18 leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and the Teamsters union in 1941 with conspiracy to overthrow the government. In a blatant assault on free speech, they were convicted of “teaching the duty, necessity, desirability and propriety of overthrowing the Government,” under the notorious Smith Act. Count four of the indictment accused the SWP and Teamster leaders of persuading workers and farmers “that the Government of the United States was imperialistic.”
The Smith Act is patently unconstitutional, but it remains on the books today, to be used when the ruling rich feel threatened by the rise of the working class.
As it decays, the imperialist world order breeds instability and more wars, and stirs up struggles by working people against the increasingly intolerable conditions we face. To protect their interests, the rulers more and more restrict basic political freedoms and unleash their main political-police agency, the FBI.
At the very same time, workers more and more need these rights, as we build unions, engage in political activity and fight for the things our class needs. Tenaciously safeguarding constitutional protections from attack by the government and the capitalist class it serves is indispensable to advancing working-class interests on the job, in the streets and in collaboration with fellow workers abroad.