Two steps taken by the Supreme Court last week underline how this Court is now a totally illegitimate institution that serves as an instrument of Trump/MAGA fascism and its systematic violations of constitutional rights. One, the Court agreed to hear the Trump regime’s challenge to lower-court rulings blocking Trump’s unconstitutional executive order to eliminate birthright citizenship. Two, the Court gave a green light to the racist redrawing of electoral maps in Texas that will give Republi-fascists additional seats in the House of Representatives.

Lending Legitimacy to Trump’s Attack on Birthright Citizenship

Bob Avakian sounded the alarm in his social media message in April (REVOLUTION #115: The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go—NOW—before it is too late!) about this outrageous and illegitimate move by Trump on his first day back in office:

In the very first days following his inauguration this January, after officially swearing to uphold the Constitution of the United States, Trump openly defied and trampled on that Constitution: He issued an “Executive Order” that was in direct opposition to the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution, which establishes that everyone born in this country is a citizen of the country. This Amendment is not a “policy”—it is part of the Constitution itself. When this Amendment was passed, right after the Civil War, one of its most important purposes was to guarantee citizenship to former slaves; and, by its very clear language, this Amendment guarantees citizenship to everyone born in the U.S.

If Trump wanted to legally and Constitutionally change this—which itself would be a very bad, reactionary move—he could try to do so by following the procedures for amending the Constitution that are set forth in the Constitution itself. But that is just the point: Trump does not recognize any limits to his fascist dictatorship—not the Constitution, and not the laws or the rule of law and due process of law.

Trump’s order was quickly challenged in the courts, and several district courts issued injunctions stopping the order from going into effect nationwide. The legal fight reached the Supreme Court earlier this year. But this shouldn’t even be a question! Presidents cannot eliminate a basic constitutional right through some arbitrary executive order. If the Supreme Court was actually acting as the so-called “guardian” of constitutional rights and rule of law, it should have immediately struck down Trump’s order as a blatant violation of the Constitution. 

Instead, in a truly disgraceful ruling in June, the fascist majority of the Supreme Court acted to greatly limit the ability of federal district courts to temporarily block clearly unconstitutional orders like Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. This gave a major boost to Trump’s moves toward consolidating his fascist hold on power.

A new class action lawsuit was filed challenging the constitutionality of Trump’s order, and a federal judge issued a nationwide injunction. And now the Supreme Court has agreed to consider the Trump regime’s demand to overturn that lower court and give a go-ahead to the elimination of birthright citizenship. 

The ruling in this case will probably come the middle of next year. We have already seen this rogue Supreme Court repeatedly blocking the efforts of lower courts to hold Trump accountable to the Constitution. And as Bob Avakian pointed out after the June ruling:

The fact is that the Supreme Court majority is determined to enable Trump to bulldoze over challenges to his fascist regime—regardless of legal precedent, basic logic, and the obvious meaning of things, including the Constitution. It is not clear at this point whether this majority is prepared to further expose its fascist nature by blatantly ruling against the clear language of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, but it is definitely possible that the Court could at some point (and perhaps soon) side with Trump’s whole assault on Birthright Citizenship, even as Trump’s actions are flagrantly in violation of the 14th Amendment. (Now Trump is threatening to revoke the citizenship of people he regards as “enemies.” Can anyone feel confident that the Supreme Court will not find a way to back him up on this?) [From social media message @BobAvakianOfficial REVOLUTION #126: More on why only the sustained determined action of decent people can be relied on to defeat and remove the Trump fascist regime.]

Giving a Go-Ahead to Racist Gerrymandering and Rigging of Elections

The fascist majority of the Supreme Court handed Trump/MAGA fascists another important win by giving an OK for Texas to use a gerrymandered electoral map that a lower court had ruled to be racially discriminatory. Texas’s Christian-fascist governor and the Republi-fascist majority in the state legislature had forced through the redrawing of the map, under orders from Trump to do so in order to gain five more Republican seats in the House in the next election.

Gerrymandering means redrawing electoral maps to favor a particular party. In the hands of the Republicans—a fully fascist, white supremacist party—gerrymandering is aimed at guaranteeing electoral victories for them by splitting up and diminishing the effects of the votes of Black and other oppressed people, who generally vote Democratic. The result in Texas is that in a state that is 40 percent white, white voters control over 73 percent of congressional seats.

Republicans across the country—in Missouri, Virginia, Indiana, and other states—are also trying to carry out gerrymandering to gain more congressional seats. And, as revcom.us has analyzed, racist gerrymandering is just one of the ways that the Trump regime and MAGA fascists are working overtime, from many different angles, to rig and steal any future elections. 

A Shameful Secretive Court That Rules In the Shadows

The ruling on Texas gerrymandering is another in this Supreme Court’s “shadow docket”—which the Court’s majority has used repeatedly to overturn lower courts that ruled against Trump’s unconstitutional acts. Over 90 percent of those shadow docket rulings this year have been in favor of Trump. These are decisions that are unsigned, decided without hearing oral arguments, and most of the time, include little or no explanation of the legal basis for the ruling.

But the actions of this Court speak volumes. As Bob Avakian points out:

[T]hose who make up the majority on the Supreme Court are not acting as “legal scholars” who adhere to the Constitution and make rational judgments about whether laws are constitutional. They are fascist functionaries who “re-interpret” the Constitution and the laws, ignoring and defying legal precedent, basic logic and the clear meaning of things, as a key part of enforcing the aims of the Trump fascist regime, of which they are effectively an instrument.(From REVOLUTION #126: More on why only the sustained determined action of decent people can be relied on to defeat and remove the Trump fascist regime.)

To re-emphasize: this fascist-dominated Supreme Court is a thoroughly illegitimate institution.