As President Trump continues to amass authoritarian power, we should consider the shocking role of the Supreme Court in facilitating his power grab. Trump v. United States declared the President immune from prosecution for breaking any criminal law as long as he uses his Presidential powers to commit his crimes. It allowed Trump to get away with gross violations of the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause. It foreclosed all feasible paths for enforcing the 14th Amendment’s Insurrection Clause against Trump and other participants in the attempted coup of Jan. 6.
In the emergency docket this year, the Court has been overwhelmingly solicitous to Trump’s assertions of unconstrained Presidential power. For the time being, it’s a-okay with Trump destroying the Department of Education, deporting undocumented immigrants to countries where they may face torture, firing 16,000 civil servants from 6 agencies without cause, even firing heads of independent agencies, deporting U.S. citizens on the pretext that the 14th Amendment doesn’t establish birthright citizenship, canceling millions of dollars of research grants already awarded, etc.
As I have previously argued, the Supreme Court’s lawless and massively destructive actions regarding Presidential power have little to do with Constitutional reasoning (which it often doesn’t bother to present in the emergency docket), but with its authoritarian mindset. Here I’ll trace their mindset to a particular understanding of executive power derived from the authoritarianism of the capitalist workplace.
