The Supreme Court of the United States, an institution often criticized as being the final line of defense for the rich and powerful within the U.S., has taken up a docket full of cases indicating a disastrous swing toward far-right reaction. As part of the reactionary push to dismantle the federal-regulatory state, the court heard argument on Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. On December 13 of last year, just a month ago, the court added Fischer v. United States, appealing the conviction of Joseph Fischer, one of the conspirators of the tragicomic January 6 putsch. The outcome of this case has the potential to reverse convictions on other so-called January 6 cases. In a direct attack on the poor, working class, and unhoused people of the U.S. empire, the court also added City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, to determine if the Oregon city government can arrest unhoused people for “camping.” They also added Starbucks v. McKinney at the behest of the coffee giant, also no stranger to coverage in the Red Clarion, seeking to have a more stringent test applied for relief from the company’s illegal firing of union organizers.
If the argument in Relentless and Loper are any indication, the center-leaning minority of three justices on the court stand no chance of carrying even a single decision in the year to come. As Butcher Biden continues to unleash hell on the people of Palestine and his government at home breaks the backs of unions, enforces cruel debt recovery schemes, and fails to achieve major policy objectives, he and his rickety coalition are under attack from even farther right enemies within the ruling class. Going into the 2024 election year, we should expect this assault to grow in strength as the ruling class continues its consolidation around the farthest right reactionaries in government and abandons its pretensions to centrism.
What do these cases mean?
Relentless and Loper: Ending the Last Vestiges of the New Deal
The regulatory state is a term that describes the expansion of the U.S. government by the New Deal progressives. The U.S. federal regulatory agencies — the National Labor Relations Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Reserve System, the Environmental Protection Agency, etc. — are the result of this expansion of government. As you can see from the short list, many of these agencies were conjured into being by the Roosevelt progressives in order to “tame” the “excesses” of capitalism. The Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) are designed to manage banking and money-flow and prevent enormous capitalist crises like the Great Depression. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is designed to ease the conflict between labor and capital and act as a mediator between them.
These agencies were created to avert a revolution during the Great Depression. They were the conscious design of a cartel of “progressive” capitalists who had chosen to forgo immediate profits in order to adjust the long-term stability of the capitalist state. The unregulated markets that produced the Great Depression were supposed to be tamed, the rampant class warfare practiced by corporations (who had, until the late 1930s, frequently resorted to openly hiring mercenaries to break strikes by killing strikers) was meant to be brought under control. At the same time, this plan of progressive New Deal politics had, beginning in the early 1930s, reinvigorated the dead Democratic Party and created an unholy coalition of labor leaders, Black voters who were steadily being alienated by the realignment of the Republican Party, and social liberals by redistributing some of the profits of the capitalist class back to the suffering working class.
Obviously, that coalition has broken down. The New Dealers are dead. The extra profits have been clawed back. The agencies no longer provide much benefit to the working class, other than a tangle of regulations that capitalists see as intruding on their rightful domain. Do businesses want to be told that they have to comply with environmental regulations? No. Do they want the NLRB breathing down their neck if they crush a union drive with a little too much vigor? No.
The far-right wing of the reactionary ruling class has forgotten or doesn’t care about the systemic danger of removing the regulatory agencies. They see their rate of profit declining and are pushing to increase it. There are only a few ways this can happen, namely through warfare with foreign countries and the expansion of a colonial or neo-colonial empire, or through the immiseration of the U.S. working class at home. They long for a return to the 1890-1936 period of U.S. capitalism, before regulation and codified labor rights, when striking was a crime punishable by death.
If the court rules in favor of the corporations in Relentless and Loper, it will be the first step on the road to dismantling the federal regulatory state. Federal agencies are created by U.S. Congressional laws. Both of these cases represent an attack on the court’s deference to regulatory agencies reading of their own statutes and will invite the Supreme Court to peer into how the agencies regulate and control the areas they have been assigned authority. More important than this arcane legal question (which will dismantle fifty years of precedent and allow the court to intervene in any ongoing question before a federal agency) is that this will signal to the court’s far-right fascist allies that the time has come to bring a challenge questioning whether the federal agencies can exist at all.
The question in Loper is whether the Department of Commerce can require fishing boats to pay for the federal observers required by a certain law; the lower courts followed what is known as Chevron deference, stating that an agency can read its own statutes expansively, and the court grants deference to that reading. The same question is presented in Relentless.
In two years, the court could strike down and basically dissolve all executive regulatory bodies. In a stroke, this would deregulate all markets, end all labor rights, and open the doors for a full fascist reaction on every political front.
Fischer: Rehabilitating Far-Right Paramilitaries
The Fischer case is about the constitutionality of a charge brought against the January 6 putschists. Joseph Fischer, along with many of the other putschists, were charged with obstructing a congressional proceeding, a felony with a penalty of up to five years incarceration. This charge, a violation of 18 U.S.C. 1505, is the core of many of the prosecutions against the January 6 defendants. Fischer’s lawyers — and potentially the Supreme Court — argue that the law doesn’t apply, because the “obstruction” was intended to refer to interfering with an ongoing investigation, not physically occupying the capitol.
If the court rules in favor of Fischer, we can expect the already lackluster prosecutions of the January 6 putschists to begin to fall apart. Those who have already been sentenced will likely seek redress, and those who are awaiting sentencing or trial will make hay from such a ruling.
But that’s what it would be designed to do. By weakening this law, which will never be used against, for instance, poor or working-class defendants, the Supreme Court would thereby grant its blessing to the far-right putsch. We must understand this for what it is: unlike the hysterics by the Biden camp surrounding January 6, we cannot classify this as a “failed” coup; this was a putsch exercise that was never intended to make it as far as it did. This trial run was so remarkably successful that the leadership had no idea how to turn around and transform that success on the ground into political action.
Next time, they will.
Starbucks v. McKinney: Weakening the Unions
The McKinney case was brought before the Supreme Court by the bottomless legal fund of the Starbucks Corporation. In 2022, Starbucks fired seven employees in a Memphis, Tennessee store for attempting to unionize. Those workers filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (which is under threat from Relentless and Loper as discussed above). The NLRB asked the U.S. District Court in Tennessee to grant an injunction requiring Starbucks to rehire those employees, and it did.
The Starbucks Corporation says that the District Court shouldn’t have granted that injunction, and that the way the NLRB gets injunctions is wrong. This more lenient test that the courts grant to the NLRB is part of the National Labor Relations Act, the law which created it. Starbucks and its lawyers are asking the Supreme Court to attack a core part of the National Labor Relations Act and strike at the NLRB’s power to compel corporations to behave in accordance with the law.
The growth of union drives and the expansion of the power of labor within the last three years has spooked the corporate owners of the U.S. ruling class. McKinney is part of the two-pronged attack by these interests on the rights won by the struggles of working people in the United States over the past century. Unlike the broader assaults of Relentless and Loper, McKinney is a direct blow aimed at weakening unions and their legal powers.
Should the Supreme Court grant the relief requested in Relentless and McKinney, it will only be a matter of time before the National Labor Relations Act is completely nullified.
Grants Pass: Killing the Poor Outright
The footsoldiers of American fascism are the local organizations of white supremacy. At the most granular level, they are represented by homeowner’s associations. The city government sits at a level above the dreaded HOA, but still holds very local power. In Grants Pass, the power of the city government to criminalize homelessness is up for review. Critically, the currently controlling decision in Oregon is the Ninth Circuit decision of Martin v. Boise, which prohibits governments in the nine Western states under that court — including California — from punishing homeless people for sleeping outside when cities don’t have sufficient space in their shelters.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (another executive federal agency) announced that more than 650,000 people were houseless in January of 2023, a 12% increase since 2022. Over a third of the nation’s unhoused population was in Washington, California, and Oregon, which each had more than 20,000 unhoused people at the time of the count. We know homelessness will be on the rise as the tidal wave of evictions follows the lifting of the rent moratoriums and renter’s assistance that ended when the government declared the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The court is being asked to prepare for the murder, arrest, and criminalization of tens or hundreds of thousands of unhoused people. This wave of evictions has been foreseen; the ruling class is aware that it will cause social unrest, anger, resentment, and prove the failures of the capitalist system. What are they doing to get ready for it? They’re training more cops in urban warfare and counterinsurgency, and they’re asking the Supreme Court to permit cities (and states) to proclaim unhoused people to be outlaws, subject to arbitrary search, seizure, and arrest.
A Dark Road Ahead
There is no doubt that these are grim tidings. The ruling class is eating itself alive, an ouroboros of recrimination and fascism, as it seeks some way to bring stability to the failing U.S. empire. It is critical for the advanced masses to be prepared; to foresee the acts of the ruling class; to prepare for them. Even if mass organization and direct action fails to prevent the Supreme Court from acting on each of these cases — even in the worst case where each passes into law — we must be prepared to mitigate the consequences and to organize those who will undoubtedly be thrown out of work, out of their homes, and abandoned to die in the streets by the uncaring machinery of profit.Forewarned is forearmed. And we must go armed.
