US Supreme Court declares president has unlimited, dictatorial power

Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in Trump v. United States is a declaration by the fascistic judges who control the court that the president has unlimited and essentially dictatorial power. According to the decision, a president cannot be held legally accountable for any act carried out as president.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion supported by the far-right majority, ruling that the president has presumptive “immunity” for “official acts.” As a result, they determined that Trump is “immune” from prosecution for most of his actions related to the fascistic coup of January 6, 2021, which sought to block the transfer of power.

In 1977, three years after resigning from the White House in disgrace, former President Richard Nixon told journalist David Frost that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” This statement, which was treated as an expression of Nixon’s criminal character for decades, has now been endorsed by the Supreme Court.

The dissents in the case spell out the far-reaching implications. Sotomayor wrote, “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military dissenting coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune.” She added, “the President is now a king above the law.”

The decision underscore several facts:

1. If Trump’s January 6, 2021 coup had been successful in stopping the transfer of power and maintaining Trump in office, the Supreme Court would have sanctioned this overthrow of constitutional rule. Three-and-a-half years later, the conditions that underlay the coup not only remain; they have intensified.

2. The Supreme Court’s rampage against democratic rights—including the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the recent decision backing the Biden administration’s claim of unchallengeable power to separate immigrants from their families—is part of an assault on democratic forms of rule as a whole and the sanctioning of presidential dictatorship.

3. Involved is not just Trump’s actions or what he might do if re-elected. The immunity proclaimed by the Supreme Court applies to all presidents. The current occupant of the White House, Biden, is himself clearly guilty of violations of both international and domestic law as part of US support for the genocide in Gaza.

4. The Democratic Party is fully complicit in the assault on democratic rights, as it has worked to cover up the significance of the January 6 coup and rehabilitate the Republican Party. The central priority of Biden and the Democrats is the escalation of global war, including the genocide in Gaza and the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.

5. There is no faction of the ruling class or section of the state apparatus that is committed to basic democratic rights. This was already demonstrated nearly 25 years ago, when the Supreme Court intervened in the 2000 elections to stop the recounting of ballots and handed the election to George W. Bush—without a protest from the Democrats.

6. The objective social basis for the turn of the ruling class to dictatorship is the extreme growth of social inequality. US billionaires' collective wealth is a record $5.2 trillion. Everything is subordinated to the interests of a tiny oligarchy within unimaginable sums of wealth. Political forms are coming into line with social reality.

7. The tendency towards dictatorship is inherent in the capitalist system in the imperialist epoch, which is characterized by the dominance of finance capital in the economy and by imperialist wars for the redivision of access to labor, markets and raw materials. 

8. Democratic rights can only be secured and the threat of dictatorship stopped through a movement of the working class, independent of and in opposition to both capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans.

9. The defense and expansion of democracy requires the expropriation of the capitalist oligarchs, an end to the dictatorship of the corporate and financial elite, the establishment of a workers state, in the US and internationally, and the socialist reorganization of social and economic life.

The growing struggles of workers throughout the world is the objective basis for the development of a mass, international movement for socialism. The transformation of this objective movement into a conscious struggle for power requires the development in the working class of a mass international socialist movement.

This is the essential purpose of the Socialist Equality Party election campaign.