It wasn’t. Warren’s politics were class peace and reform. He treated Communists as class agitators, but he also ruled consistently to “soften” the excesses of capital.

The Warren court went on to decide some of the most important cases in modern Statesian jurisprudence. Brown v. Board of Education, ending legal segregation, Loving v. Virginia, outlawing antimiscegenation laws, Griswold v. Connecticut, establishing the right to birth control, and four major criminal cases that established the rights we think of as fundamental to the criminal process: Gideon v. Wainwright, the right to a court-appointed attorney, Brady v. Maryland, the right to be given exculpatory evidence held by the state, Wong Sun v. United States, granting the right to suppress evidence that was obtained by the police illegally, and Miranda v. Arizona, the right to be informed of your rights when you’re arrested, the famous Miranda warning.

Among these progressive expansions of individual rights was Robinson v. California, the case that the current Supreme Court has just limited to its facts and robbed of any precedent-establishing power. What did the Warren court hold in Robinson? That it was cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the 8th amendment of the federal constitution to criminalize a “status” over which a person has no control. In that case, the court struck down a California law making it a crime to be addicted to drugs. The fascist court of John G. Roberts, Jr., has just held, in the newly issued City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, that the Robinson ruling doesn’t apply to the homeless. This is just the latest in the Roberts court’s piecemeal march against established Warren precedents, and represents nothing less than the sharp contraction of the U.S. empire.

Warren and the Apogee of Empire

By 1953, the war had been over for eight years. Europe lay devastated. In 1948, Truman enacted the Marshall Plan, pumping U.S. capital into areas Washington’s elite thought might be vulnerable to Communism. It was a kind of economic GLADIO, a stay-behind program (and if you don’t recognize GLADIO, that’s worth reading up on). The world war hadn’t ended before the Cold War began, and the U.S., its domestic production untouched by the conflict, stepped out of Great Britain’s shadow to claim hegemony over the West and proclaim itself the sword and shield of the Euro-American capitalist class.

Eisenhower was the first truly post-war president to preside over this new American empire. In a sense Warren and his court, which lasted until 1969, was an extension of the ruling class politics of the age. What was this policy? The expansion of New Deal-type programs — which Warren had attacked before taking the bench — and the creation of a new Pax Americana. Under Eisenhower, post-war imperial wealth flowed from all corners of the globe and it was used to establish social security, the interstate highway system, and NASA. Instead of the growth of social democracy and the welfare state, as seen in Europe, class struggle was suppressed in the U.S. through the expansion of public infrastructure and the goodwill (read: self-preservation) of the capitalist class, which gave out robust pensions, employer-provided health insurance, etc. These benefits fell primarily to the “white” workers, which by now included formerly “non-white” ethnicities from Europe such as the Irish and Italians. The class struggle was thus forced underground during this period, and it manifested explosively in the struggles for national liberation that shook the country from the mid-50s until the end of the 1970s.

We needn’t prove Warren’s personal motivations as Chief Justice to make our case. In fact, from all outside appearances, he genuinely believed in the principles he espoused through his decisions. But such is the case with many bourgeois politicians. They earnestly believe their class ideology. The fact that it serves a class purpose operates on a level below their conscious understanding. It is typical for members of the ruling class to be thoroughly seduced by the self-justifications and illusions that make up their class morality.

Above all, it is this legacy of bourgeois morality that the ultra-fascist majority on the Roberts court have set as their target. As arch-reactionaries, they are working to roll back the clock and restore the early 20th century pre-Warren legal landscape. They are ushering in an era of naked class domination, stripped of the comfortable fat provided by the loot of empire.

Grants Pass is a Return of Labor Discipline

To understand Grants Pass we have to look at the direct precedent that the Roberts court has overturned. The case in question is Martin v. Boise, a 2019 decision concerning unhoused people that was issued by the Ninth Circuit federal Court of Appeals. The Ninth Circuit covers the geographical area of Washington state, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, California, and Arizona. According to the 2022 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report released by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, 40% of the country’s entire unhoused population lives within the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction. As the fascist justice Gorsuch, author of the majority opinion in Grants Pass, noted, “homelessness in this country has reached its highest levels since the government began reporting data on the subject.”

The Martin ruling made it unconstitutional (within the Ninth Circuit) for a state to enforce criminal penalties on public camping if the city in question lacked sufficient shelter beds to house its unhoused population. The legal rationale is dull, but in essence the court held that it was a violation of the 8th amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment to jail houseless people simply because they had nowhere to stay, especially if the city lacked sufficient public relief. The Martin decision was predicated on the Warren court’s Robinson ruling, where the court held it to be a violation of the 8th amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause to criminalize addiction.

City of Grants Pass arises from a Martin injunction brought by Gloria Johnson and John Logan, who challenged the city’s public-camping laws. They brought a suit as a federal class action, representing “all involuntarily homeless people living in Grants Pass.” A panel of the Ninth Circuit found that Johnson and Logan faced a credible threat of punitive action from Grants Pass and that all unsheltered people in the city were “involuntarily homeless” because the city’s unhoused population exceeds available shelter beds. The city, desperate to retain its punishment power and other tools of state repression, sought a rehearing en banc by the entire court; it was denied. 

Grants Pass filed a petition to the Supreme Court for certiorari (certification that the issue be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States). The cities of Albuquerque, Anchorage, Chico, Chino, Colorado Springs, Fillmore, Garden Grove, Glendora, Henderson, Honolulu, Huntington Beach, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Murrieta, Newport Beach, Roseville, Saint Paul, San Clemente, San Diego, San Francisco, San Juan Capistrano, Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma, and Westminster, the National League of Cities (representing over 19,000 other American cities and towns), the League of California Cities (representing California’s 477 cities), the League of Oregon Cities (representing Oregon’s 241 cities), the Association of Idaho Cities (representing Idaho’s 199 cities), the League of Arizona Cities and Towns (representing all 91 municipalities in Arizona), the North Dakota League of Cities (representing 355 cities), the Counties of Honolulu, San Bernardino, San Francisco, and Orange, the National Association of Counties (representing all 3,069 counties of the U.S. empire), the California State Association of Counties, the Special Districts Association of Oregon, the Washington State Association of Municipal Attorneys, the International Municipal Lawyers Association, the District Attorneys of Sacramento and San Diego Counties, the California State Sheriffs’ Association, the California Police Chiefs Association, the Washington State Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, California Governor Gavin Newsom, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, and 20 other states (Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia) all joined the city to support the petition for certiorari.

All the lackeys of law and order, all the petty bourgeois strivers and graspers, all the pigs and their captains, all the fascist forces of the Western United States, put their names on the petition and many of these wrote briefs in support of Grants Pass, begging for Martin to be overturned. The Roberts court was only too happy to oblige.

The Unhoused: Proletarians and the Reserve Army of Labor

The unhoused generally fall into one of two categories when it comes to class. Either they are themselves working class proletarians, who work by wage labor, or they are sub-proletarians, thrown out of the labor force entirely and denied any means of support. These are people who would otherwise live by wage labor, who have no substantial property or investment in the machinery, land, or other tools by which society produces the commodities that are its lifeblood. Many unhoused people were sheltered proletarians or even petit-bourgeoisie only a short time before they became unhoused. With the dismantling of the feeble safety nets erected during the imperial apogee by the “liberal” crowd of Clintonites in the 90s, it has become easier than ever to fall out of the sheltered working classes and enter the ranks of the sub-proletariat, the great unhoused.

The unhoused already suffer a number of critical disabilities inflicted on them by “civil society” before we reach the question of criminalization. Lacking a permanent address and in many times deprived of a stable telephone number, the unhoused are generally prevented from voting by registration requirements. This means the lofty list of cities, towns, counties, etc., that filed to support the City of Grants Pass in its bid to criminalize homelessness were elected without input from the very population they want to police. This is what we mean by class domination. (In the case of the rest of the working proletariat, this relationship is slightly more disguised; because we can technically cast a ballot, and we are often duped into thinking the ballot matters.)

Marx calls those who are kept out of work the relative surplus population (meaning, those people who are, relative to the active work available, kept as extra or surplus without employment) or the industrial reserve army. By limiting the number of jobs available and ensuring that every proletarian and sub-proletarian who isn’t working lives in squalor and near-death, the capitalist class “forms a disposal industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost…. [I]t creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation.” Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 25, Section 3. At the same time, this industrial reserve army creates a source of extra labor with which to break strikes and serves as a club to discipline the labor force. 

Imagine, for instance, that you work in a McDonalds or an Amazon warehouse. The conditions are atrocious in this particular location. Wages are being docked or withheld illegally, people are being disciplined for nothing, and you aren’t being allowed to take your breaks. You decide to unionize to force the owners to the table; after all, if everyone threatens to walk off the job, they’ll have to make concessions. If you’re in a city where there is a very large unemployed or under-employed population, the owners might simply say “Fine,” discharge you and all your fellow would-be unionizers, and hire replacements from that unemployed labor force — that industrial reserve army.

This helps keep down wages even before we begin to account for the widespread U.S. practice of utilizing basically free prison labor. Criminalization gives capitalists the chance to make use of that free labor because the habitually unhoused will be arrested again and again, and eventually be given sentences of imprisonment that turn them into a state workforce. This is state-labor-for-hire without compensation, all perfectly legal under the 13th amendment to the constitution, which outlaws slavery except as punishment for a crime. After all, about one-third of all California’s firefighters are judicial slaves.

The effect of this ruling on wages and benefits occurs purely by operation of the underlying political economy that will result. It doesn’t require an active conspiracy on the part of the court, the cities, the sheriffs and police, or anyone in the entire chain of command that will ultimately enforce the punitive bans that wind up criminalizing homelessness. Even if, at each step in this process, the agent of the state is merely expressing an honestly-held dislike of “public vagrancy” (and the Gorsuch opinion is brimming with classist descriptions of public defecation and children wading through used needles), it will have the same ultimate effect. More enforceable criminal penalties means more prisoners; it means more court fees; it means, therefore, in states where inmates are forced into slavery, a larger free laboring population. This means the cost of labor will fall relative to its value as more laborers enter the market. Businesses will have the choice between hiring free workers, who might be disobedient, agitate for a rise in wages, etc., or paying the state money to make use of a captive work force. The market price of labor will therefore fall. This, while we are experiencing the sharpest rise in cost of living since the inflation crises at the close of the 1970s, ensures that more workers will be made unhoused as their wages fall, and a downward pressure will continue to be exerted on wages.

The more precarious a workforce is, the more subject to random arrest and search or other punitive measures, the less likely it is to seek redress through unionization and organization. That lesson was demonstrated by the poultry industry when they simply had their unionizing workers deported en masse.

Marching Counter Clockwise

This decision is part of the court’s broad assault on the Warren-based state, the administrative state (that is, the delegation of rulemaking authority from Congress to the administrative agencies), and, critically, the legal regime of unionization. The ultra-fascist justices have rejected a century of precedent and appear intent on ushering in an era of labor-discipline that resembles the U.S. of 1900, before the labor struggles that established the legal right to unionization and prior to the creation of the National Labor Relations Board. The Grants Pass decision fits neatly into this plan to march backwards, into a pre millenarian century.

The door now stands open for the re-establishment of the debtor’s prison in name as well as form. Although the judicial system has long practiced a kind of debt imprisonment in actuality, in form the debtor’s prison is often seen as a quaint Victorian curiosity. There is much less need for covert imprisonment-for-debt now that the highest court in the country has ruled that it is permissible to make homelessness illegal. Yes, certainly, there is an act that these laws proscribe (sleeping in public), but the act is inextricably tied to the status that Gorsuch claims they aren’t criminalizing. The Supreme Court has legalized the debtor’s prison, has given its blessing to the mass incarceration of the unhoused, and has created the conditions for a massive reactionary backlash.

We can see it in the language the majority uses, through Gorsuch. He disdainfully complains that a Chico, California homeless shelter wasn’t sufficient under Martin, even though it “included protective fencing, large water totes, handwashing stations, portable toilets and a large canopy for shade…. Why? Because, in that court’s view, appropriate shelter requires indoor, not outdoor spaces.” Gorsuch has described a concentration camp for the unhoused and mocked a court for holding it insufficient.

This is the future imagined by the Roberts court. Of course Gorsuch defends the concentration camp. When the Supreme Court issues a decision, it isn’t merely making a legal ruling, it is communicating with the parties and potential future parties. The parties to this case weren’t merely the City of Grants Pass, Gloria Johnson, and John Logan, but also every one of the thousands of cities and counties, sheriff’s associations, police groups, district attorneys, state’s attorneys, and other agents of the bourgeois state apparatus. The lurid language that Gorsuch uses is a signal. Justices choose their words carefully. We must be prepared. The state is. They are preparing labor camps for the houseless, “shelters” with protective fencing and a canopy for shade. Taken in the light of the other rulings the Supreme Court recently decided, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, which we discussed when the year began, the intention of the court is clear. They aim to strip administrative agencies of their power, destroy the NLRB, and subject working people throughout the country to a regime of labor discipline by police control.

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.

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.