Last Thursday, the Supreme Court met to hear a case that will have a potentially huge impact on whether, and how quickly, Trump is able to hammer in a major part of the larger fascist agenda. What is urgently needed now are masses of people—in every corner of society, and in every institution—uniting all who can be united to raise the demand: The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go—NOW!

What the Case Is All About

On his very first day in office, Trump signed an “executive order” that does away with the Constitutional guarantee to birthright citizenship. This means that you are a citizen if you are born in the U.S. Not only was this written into the Constitution itself after the Civil War, the rights of all children born in the U.S. to such citizenship—no matter the so-called “legality” of their parents at the time—has been upheld by the Supreme Court several times already.

Totally ignoring all this, Trump decreed that, beginning February 19 of this year, anyone born to parents who were not citizens or did not have green cards would NOT be a citizen. This includes children born to parents who were here on visas and work permits, parents here on other kinds of visas, and DACA recipients. (DACA refers to “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.” In 2012 then-president Obama signed an order that enables people who came to the U.S. as children but don’t have papers to live here legally for renewable periods of two years. It currently covers over half a million people.)

To put it simply, this order of Trump’s was outrageous and illegal. Listen to the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian (BA):

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. (from social media message @BobAvakianOfficial REVOLUTION #115)

And that, in any court basing itself on the rule of law, is all that needed to be and should have been said last Thursday. Along with a loud “case dismissed” and a warning not to bring any more such blatantly illegal and unconstitutional nonsense before the Court again!

In fact, several district courts did just this. (District courts are federal courts on a lower level than the Supreme Court, covering specific districts of the U.S. Their rulings on constitutional issues have been generally accepted as binding for the whole country unless reversed by a higher court.) Trump’s lawyers feared a possible repeat at the Supreme Court, so they “only” asked that those district court rulings be restricted to the districts in question. Meanwhile, Trump’s utterly illegal executive order would go in force everywhere else. 

If Trump's request were to be approved by the Supreme Court, a child born to an undocumented mother in Pennsylvania, would be stateless. But if that same child were born to that same mother in New Jersey (where a district court ruled in favor of birthright citizenship), they would be a citizen.

Trump’s lawyer specifically asked that the Supreme Court NOT consider the constitutionality of Trump's overturning of birthright citizenship. Still, the Supreme Court could have and should have said precisely what BA points to: that there is a procedure for changing the Constitution that must be followed, and this is not it.

Instead, most of the justices accepted Trump’s terms and engaged in hair-splitting and seriously misplaced and/or basically irrelevant arguments. The main exceptions were the two openly MAGA lunatics Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who just wanted to uphold Trump’s arguments. Some of the three liberal justices at times made important points, but they gave far too much respect to the fascist arguments being made by the government lawyer and in the main did not expose and resist the overall fascist terms being set.  

The other argument before the Court is important, and has to do with whether the courts will have any ability to be a "check" on Trump's fascist program or whether the courts affirm the fascist idea that Trump is, as BA has put it: "above the law, and that Trump is the law." Trump's lawyers were arguing that district court rulings on the unconstitutionality of a law should not extend beyond the district covered to the country as a whole. But again, this was argued out on way too narrow terms having to do with the impracticality of having whole different understandings of the Constitution in force in different states.

The fact that these justices did not just quickly reject this executive order as unconstitutional and censure Trump for even trying such a thing shows just how far things have gone. A ruling could come any time, with extremely serious consequences. Three big things at stake here: 

• the rights and, beyond that, the very humanity of immigrants;
• whether Trump will rack up a victory in his quest to overturn the rule of law and replace it by fascist presidential decree; and
• whether this fascism will gain further ground or whether the newly rising forces of the movement against it will set it back and grow strong in doing so.

Reality: Immigrants Are FULL Human Beings and Must NOT Be Demonized and Persecuted

Step back for a minute. Imagine that someone campaigned for president on the platform of driving Jewish people out of the country. Imagine he said that the Jewish people one and all were bloodsuckers, criminals, and perverts who manipulated things for their benefit. “Evil” people who were “poisoning the blood of the country.” 

Imagine then that this person came to power and passed executive decrees that made the lives of Jewish people intolerable. Decrees that treated them as a whole new class, depriving them of rights they previously had. Decrees that cut off their livelihoods. Decrees that enabled police to come in the dead of night and tear them from their families, as their left-behind and traumatized children screamed and cried in terror. Decrees that enabled the regime to disappear some Jews into places inaccessible to ordinary people. Decrees that enabled masked men to seize Jews on the streets and hustle them off to unknown camps for the crime of writing editorials against these policies, or for no crime at all. And what if judges who were perceived to be against or in any way standing in the way of such arbitrary and hateful decrees were demonized, threatened with assassination by followers of the president, or even arrested.

Unfortunately, you don’t have to imagine it. That’s what Hitler and the Nazis DID in Germany, eight years before they began murdering Jewish people en masse in extermination camps. 

There Must Be No Business as Usual in This Country

Trump’s lawyers argued that while the executive order doing away with birthright citizenship could be temporarily suspended in the three districts whose courts had ruled it unconstitutional, it should go into immediate effect in the 91 other districts! In other words, the very clear words of the Constitution would be nullified by the orders of one fascist leader. The Court wouldn’t even have to uphold the order as legal—just doing nothing other than limiting the scope of constitutional rulings below the Supreme Court would be a win for Trump.

The scenes of injustice and terror we referred to above, and the already way-too-advanced and way-too-unopposed dehumanization of millions of people would go to a whole other level. 

At the same time, if the Court does what legally must be done—that is, rule that on its merits Trump’s appeal is specious (that is, empty and worthless)—that could set up a further confrontation. Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, two top henchmen of Trump, have threatened that if the courts don't abide by Trump's order, then Trump should just do away with the right of habeas corpus altogether. Habeas corpus is the principle that nobody can be put in jail, let alone thrown out of the country, without due process of law, or to put it another way, “without their day in court.” This extremely dangerous threat from these Nazis underscores the urgency of driving this fascist regime from power. And here we have to understand what BA has argued: "Relying on the 'normal procedures' and 'regular ways of doing things' will not, and cannot, defeat this fascism and put an end to its very real, and continually more extreme, reign of terror."

Right now, most commentators think that the Supreme Court will rule on this within the next two months. This only emphasizes the urgency that people be made aware of this attack and that those who know about it are “tense” to the possibility of going into the streets around it with little notice. 

Even more, these next weeks must be filled with protests, gatherings, banner drops, postering and all kinds of other ways of amassing people around the overall demand that TRUMP MUST GO NOW!!! And June 14, the day when nationwide protests have been called around the slogan “No Kings Day,” must witness a massive outpouring all over the country and in Washington, DC itself.