Driven by anti-Trump hysteria, the Joseph Biden White House and Democratic prosecutors are using the courts to try to frame up and drive their main opponent for the presidency out of politics. In doing so, they’re dealing serious blows to constitutional freedoms.
These rights, won over decades of class struggles, provide working people with crucial protection from interference by the capitalist government into political activity, religious beliefs and union organizing, and other fundamental rights.
Regardless of the fact their target is the leading candidate of one of the bosses’ parties, the drive by Democrats to criminalize political differences will inevitably come back on the working class. Workers need constitutional freedoms to discuss, debate and organize when we walk strike picket lines, build union solidarity and whenever we take steps to organize independently of the bosses’ parties in the political arena.
The erosion of these rights — under either Democratic or Republican administrations — only serves the interests of the capitalist rulers against working people. Safeguarding the Constitution’s limits on the reach of the state is in the interests of all workers.
Constitutional rights were won by the toiling population in the course of two revolutions, the first ending the rule of the British crown and the second overturning slavery. Freedoms conquered by artisans, farmers, the emerging labor movement and others in these battles were put to use in the class struggles that forged industrial unions in the 1930s; by the movement that uprooted Jim Crow segregation in the 1950s and ’60s; in fights against Washington’s wars from Korea to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan; and in efforts since 1919 to build a communist party on U.S. soil.
Today, the U.S. rulers are struggling to shore up their dominant but diminishing place in the capitalist world pecking order, leading them into sharpening clashes with rivals that will lead to new wars. The record of the first and second imperialist world wars shows that these slaughters are always accompanied by attempts by the rulers to restrict political freedoms.
Since the late 1930s, they’ve relied on the FBI as their central political police force. This shift was announced with the 1941 conviction and imprisonment of leaders of the Socialist Workers Party under the Smith “Gag” Act that outlaws advocating revolutionary ideas.
“Defending and extending the freedoms protected by the US Constitution is at the center of the class struggle today,” the SWP said in its 2022 political resolution, published in The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward.
New moves to gag Trump
Liberal sections of the U.S. ruling class, fervent Biden supporters and their backers in the middle class are trying to throw Trump in jail and prevent tens of millions from voting for him. They’ve organized several lawsuits, in which the right to a fair trial and other key freedoms are being suppressed.
The latest attempt to silence Trump came May 24. Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith demanded Judge Aileen Cannon prevent him from saying anything about the FBI. Smith has charged Trump under the Espionage Act with mishandling classified documents.
Smith’s pretext for this assault on free speech was Trump’s May 21 statement that the Biden administration “authorized the FBI to use deadly force” during the raid by 30 heavily armed FBI and Secret Service agents on his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the unconstitutional break-in in 2022. Smith claims Trump’s statement about the raid was “misleading.”
But the FBI was explicitly authorized to use deadly force at Mar-a-Lago if its agents thought it was warranted. And FBI sharpshooters do have a long record of carrying out murderous assaults. These include the 1992 shooting death of an unarmed mother — who was holding a baby — and her teenage son in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the FBI siege and assault the following year on the Branch Davidian religious group that led to the massacre of more than 80 people in Waco, Texas.
Ever since Trump clinched the Republican nomination in 2016, Democrats have unleashed the FBI to go after him. FBI boss James Comey and former chief Robert Mueller were tasked with bringing Trump down both before the election and trying to impeach him afterward on utterly fabricated claims that he “colluded” with Moscow.
Learning the true history of the capitalist rulers’ political police is essential for working people.
The Socialist Workers Party launched an unprecedented lawsuit against the FBI in 1973, as more became known about FBI spying, harassment and disruption against fighters opposing Jim Crow segregation and Washington’s war in Vietnam. The victorious case helped uncover the massive scope of FBI abuses against the party and other opponents of government policy.
In 1986 federal Judge Thomas Griesa ruled that the use of cop informers to infiltrate and spy on communists violated the Constitution’s guarantee of privacy and freedom of association; that the FBI’s burglaries, planting of microphones and opening of mail at party offices was illegal; and that the FBI’s Cointelpro disruption of SWP activity and harassment of its members was against the law. The party’s campaign and legal victory defended the political space for all working people.
Today prosecutor Smith is seeking to refurbish the FBI and deal a blow to political rights, insisting that Trump “does not have an unlimited right to speak.”
Liberals’ disregard for constitutional rights was also displayed in New York, where Dexter Taylor was sentenced to 10 years in jail April 22 for legally purchasing gun parts and assembling weapons as a hobby in his home. During the trial, Taylor’s lawyer pointed to his right to bear arms under the Second Amendment. “Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here,” decreed Judge Abena Darkeh, “This is New York.”