On Monday, March 4, the highest court in the U.S. Empire issued its decision in Trump v. Anderson, returning the extreme right’s vessel, Trump, to the Colorado ballot after the Colorado Supreme Court had removed him. In the ongoing battle between factions of the owning class over the reigns of Empire — that is to say, the Democratic-centrist, the Republican-centrist, and the growing Republican-rightist faction — the Supreme Court continues to play a decisive role in permitting the right-most agents of the capitalist class to evade the capitalists’ own rules and norms put in place to govern transitions of state power within their class.
The liberal process-worshippers immediately deployed their spin doctors to explain why their so-called liberal justices on the court, including Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom this paper has already explained was appointed as a sop from Biden to the left wing of his party, also voted to keep Trump on the ballot. Despite the fact that the pro-Biden chorus has consistently made the claim that Trump and his ilk are a “threat to democracy” (they mean bourgeois democracy!) their appointed justices closed their eyes, held their noses, and voted to leave this “threat to (bourgeois!) democracy” on the ballot in Colorado.
Factions at Play
The ruling class is divided into groups, factions, and cliques. It has never been homogeneous, and the geographical layout of the U.S. Empire has played into the division of interests. As crises grow more acute and the contradictions sharpen — that is, as the divisions become more and more pronounced and the system of U.S. imperial capitalism decays — the ruling, capitalist class will be riven apart by its own internal contradictions and then, as the threat of losing power becomes real, will suddenly be welded together again into a single fighting force.
What are the factions currently on the stage? Obviously, we have the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, which at one time represented functionally different interests and ideologies within the ruling class. However, as we have seen, these names — Democrat, Republican — no longer correspond in any meaningful way to policy positions by the ruling elite. They are, more and more, losing their attachment to the real world.
So, then, we have 1) the Democratic-centrist faction, embodied in President Biden and the DNC and 2) the Republican Old Guard centrist faction. Biden is the president of compromise between these two groups. Each party then has its flanks — on the left, weakening and atrophying within the Democratic Party, are the so-called “progressives” and on the right of the GOP are the growing and strengthening MAGAcrats. The Democratic-centrist faction dominates the Democratic Party, while the MAGAcratic faction dominates the GOP.
Colorado Takes Action
Last September in the lead-up to the Colorado primary election, Republican voters in Colorado filed a petition against Trump to the effect that the 2021 January 6 putsch made him constitutionally ineligible to serve as the president of the U.S. Empire for another term. The legal theory, which is less important than the fact that the Colorado Supreme Court agreed with them, relies on Section 3 of one of the Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. imperial constitution. Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in the wake of the U.S. Civil War and designed to prevent treasonous Confederates from holding office, states that “No person shall… hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States… to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.”
The Colorado Supreme Court agreed by a 4 to 3 vote. All seven of those justices were appointed by Democratic governors of the state, and only two are registered Republicans. However, the Colorado Supreme Court is, by and large, a club of former Assistant Attorneys General and District Attorneys. The four judges that voted to strike Trump from the ballot were Richard Gabriel, Melissa Hart, Monica Marquez, and William Hood. The three who disagreed were chief justice Brian Boatright, Maria Berkenkotter, and Carlos Samour.
Richard Gabriel was a private business lawyer in Colorado; his wife is a Federal public defender in Denver, Colorado.
Melissa Hart is a Harvard law graduate, a former U.S. Department of Justice attorney, and Associate Professor Law at University of Colorado Law School.
Monica Marquez is a Yale graduate who clerked for federal judges and then worked as an attorney in Colorado’s Attorney General’s office for eight years. She was president of the Colorado LGBT Bar Association and board member of the Colorado Hispanic Bar Association before she was elevated to judgehood in 2010.
William Hood is a former prosecutor who worked for the D.A. in Colorado for ten years before becoming a District Court judge in Denver.
Maria Berkenkotter was a member of the Colorado Attorney General’s office before becoming a judge.
Carlos Samour is another former prosecutor, who worked for the district attorney’s office in Denver for a decade before becoming a judge.
Brian Boatright. The chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court and a registered Republican, he worked as a prosecutor for nearly a decade, and then was appointed to be a judge.
We can see the intraclass battle being waged here amongst representatives of the ruling bourgeois elite. On the one hand, the centrist Democrat-aligned justices have every reason to want to exclude Trump from the ballot and, even more, those who have significant vectors of social oppression have an added incentive to see Republicans broadly disempowered. Keep in mind how the Colorado Supreme Court ruled, because this is how a party must and should act to retain power.
On the other hand, the Republicans of Colorado are divided into two groups. Overall, Republican politicians are generally weak in Colorado, and have been in a sharp decline. Indeed, after the 2022 midterm elections, a Republican state representative said “Colorado Republicans need to take this and learn the lesson that the party is dead. This is an extinction-level event.” The majority of the rump Republican party is very far to the right in Colorado, and has embraced MAGA-Republican far-right positions.
However, just as there exists a federal-level “left” wing of the Republican party — the old guard who want a return to the vaguely bipartisan system of suppressing the workers together with the Democrats in a friendly sparring match over policy and the distribution of money — there exists a much smaller “left” wing of the Colorado GOP. Norma Anderson — the Anderson of Trump v. Anderson — is a former state lawmaker and a “diehard Republican,” which should give you an idea of the animosity on the Republican right between MAGAcrats and the old guard.
The Supremes Say No
Every “progressive” “left-wing” justice (!) on the Supreme Court of the United States had less courage than their Colorado counterparts Gabriel, Hart, Marquez, and Hood. The Democratic party spin machine is repeating SCOTUS’ own tortured logic: that the decision to enforce the 14th Amendment is one that has to come from a federal body, not a state one.
The majority, excluding Republican Barrett and Democrats Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, went on to decide that only the U.S. Congress can disbar someone for seeking office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — that no court, no agency, and no other authority has that power. This makes Section 3 a dead letter as there will never be an alignment of political forces that permits both chambers of the Congress to act together to ban a candidate for office, short of a single-party coup of the government.
These “progressive” justices did not act to preserve party power the way the justices in Colorado did. Why not? Because at the federal level the Democratic Party is unable to give to the left in any meaningful way. The potential of the party to act to smooth harsh conditions created by the decay of the U.S. imperial order has been totally exhausted. In essence, had the Democratic justices been successful in keeping Trump off the ballot the federal party would be forced to use further effective political tactics to give working people, students, immigrants, and the increasingly-exposed groups of the socially oppressed, who are all in peril, some kind of relief. It would prove that they, the federal-level Democrats, are capable of acting outside the barriers of propriety, and then they would be asked to do that for the benefit of their supposed constituents.
They know they can’t.
Fault Lines
We are seeing a division opening up between the state-level Democratic parties and the federal Democrats. The Colorado party is substantially more progressive and sits to the left of the federal party; it embodies the local interests of local bourgeoisie within Colorado, of which the elite financial/imperialist bourgeoisie play a very small part. With this smaller strata of imperialist bourgeoisie, the needs of the upper and middle ranks of the petit-bourgeoisie are much more strongly expressed, and thus we can see that state party politics in Colorado trend toward petit-bourgeois vacillation rather than open bourgeois reaction, which is the current trend in the federal party.
The petit-bourgeoisie are business owners and professionals. Anyone who both owns the means of production (shops, specialized technical skills, small capital) and also works to support themselves are members of this class between classes. They have interests in common both with workers and with owners, which explains why their political consciousness tends to be confused. These include middle and small-time lawyers, accountants, etc. The big bourgeoisie are those who own big capital — major firms, investments, etc. — and who do not work. Petit-bourgeois political consciousness trends toward that brand of liberalism that demands equality for women by calling for “more women prison guards!”
The lower bourgeois/petit-bourgeois makeup and ideology of the state Democratic parties means these parties trend toward faux-progressive stances. They are now progressive, now regressive in turns, because the petit-bourgeoisie is caught between the truly progressive interests of the working class and the reactionary interests of property. Open bourgeois reaction is embodied by the Biden-”left” GOP alliance, and outright counter-revolution is embodied in the MAGAcrats.
At the state level, there is still some flexibility for the dying Democratic machine. There are funds to redistribute, there are enemies to expropriate from, and there are bases of power that don’t rely directly on the imperialist ruling class of the U.S. Empire to draw from. The glacial fracturing and break-up of the Democratic Party will see increased tension between state-level Democrats and their federal counterparts as their interests diverge.
Nevertheless, the federal party is still in the driver’s seat, as the outcome of Trump v. Anderson demonstrates. There may yet be a benefit in showing state-level Democrats that they do not have to align themselves with the corpse of their federal-level party. This is something that the masses of working people in the U.S. are more and more coming to realize: that the Democrats themselves must be rejected if the working people are ever to see relief.
