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July 19, 2022
The House January 6th Committee has been holding public meetings showing how Trump tried to nullify the 2020 presidential elections. New information is coming out showing how this was a deliberate, organized attempt at a coup d’etat. Along with this, the Committee has also shown that there is a nation-wide campaign of intimidation against those election workers who insisted on accurately counting the vote in 2020, with many resigning from fear for their lives or their families.
But the Committee’s overall orientation is that democracy will be preserved if another illegal coup can be prevented. Yet what is being prepared before everyone’s eyes is a growing attempt for the conservatives to usurp power according to laws passed by Republican legislatures and approved by courts that carry out voter suppression. Trump attempted an illegal uprising on Jan. 6th, but the coming coup is likely to be blessed by the establishment as legal.
The basic nature of the Jan. 6 events was clear from the start, but the House committee is providing valuable new evidence about how they were organized, and who took part in them. It’s crystal clear that under the slogan of “Stop the Steal”, Trump and his supporters were seeking to themselves steal the election. Testimony at the House hearing shows that even most members of the Trump administration were quite clear that Biden had won the presidential election, and they repeatedly informed Trump of that. Trump himself knew he had lost a fair count, so he explored one way after another to falsify the vote, to get some key state legislatures to submit fake groups of presidential electors, and to get Congress to reject the actual election results. They all knew they were violating the law, so when the coup failed on January 6th, they ran for cover: six conservative members of Congress and several other close associates of Trump asked him for pre-emptive pardons for their activities, including Mark Meadows, who was Trump’s White House Chief of Staff on January 6, and Rudy Giuliani, a former mayor of New York City who was one of Trump’s lawyers.
Also notable was the role of white supremacist militias such as the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and the Oath Keepers. Trump sought to use them as shock troops on January 6. He was not interested in the fine points of their doctrine, which had divided them previously, but saw them as violent foot-soldiers who could be his cannon fodder. So he sought to bring them together in a violent assault on the government. Indeed, on January 6th itself, he tried to prevent the security officials from screening people for weapons, when they sought to come to his “Stop the Steal” demonstration; Trump was confident he knew who the weapons were going to be aimed at.
The Committee made extensive use of testimony from conservative Republicans, former members of the Trump administration, and even former white supremacist militia members. There can be no doubt of the plot that was revealed, and the Committee declared that was evidence to try Trump for his actions.
But what will the result of the hearings be? The House committee has declared that what happened on Jan. 6 was an attempted coup, and it will recommend that the Department of Justice take action. However it’s not likely there will be indictments of Trump and highly-placed coup participants, and especially the many Republican congresspeople who took part in the coup will get a free pass. Indeed, Biden’s DOJ has been slow to do much of anything against the big fish. It has pursued several hundred actions against people who took part in storming the Capitol on January 6, but in general it treats them much more gently than how the government treats anti-racist demonstrators.
It can be recalled that the federal investigation of 2017-2019 by special prosecutor Robert Mueller into the 2016 election and the Trump campaign had gathered enough material to prove a number of people and companies guilty of multiple crimes, but the final report said that Justice Department guidelines did not allow it to consider indicting Trump. More recently, New York state has abundant evidence of the financial fraud committed by Trump, but in February two key investigators, Carey R. Dunne and Mark F. Pomerantz, resigned because the new Manhattan District Attorney was reluctant to proceed. (1) Georgia prosecutors, despite evidence that was front page news across the country early last year, still haven’t decided whether to charge Trump for blatantly demanding that the presidential vote counts be changed. So much for equality before the law.
While the January 6th Committee is publicizing valuable information about the coup, it is silent on the main reasons for the attempted coup. The decades of market fundamentalism, deregulation, cutbacks in wages and working conditions, cutbacks in social programs, and disregard of the environment are leading to major problems, and the bourgeoisie is divided about how to proceed. A section seeks removal of the rights of minorities, women, workers, and so on, while another section is more moderate, but still doesn’t have an answer. The bourgeoisie as a whole doesn’t see the need for the major economic changes that would be needed to fight both global warming and the growing desperation of millions upon millions of people. The Democrats and Republicans represent different factions of the bourgeoisie, but neither faction is willing to abandon market fundamentalism. Still, in the midst of the growing crisis, they differ over what to do, and the bourgeoisie wasn’t going to let such differences be settled simply by what the population as a whole thought about them.
So behind the coup, stands the views and opinions of the bourgeoisie. The capitalists who rule this country may have varied opinions about Trump, but they just aren’t that upset about a politicians who gave them a trillion dollar tax break. A section of the bourgeoisie wants to push the country even further to the right, while the rest of the bourgeoisie just can’t get too mad at those who would shower it with money.
The political pundits used to talk about how demographic changes — the increase in the percentage of minorities in particular — would change American politics and defeat the reactionary “Southern strategy” of appealing to racist bigots, but the pundits ignored that the conservatives could suppress the voting rights of the minorities.
So why did members of Trump’s own administration refuse to carry out the final steps towards the attempted coup? They aren’t closet liberals who are less conservative than Trump. It is also not from commitment to democracy and constitutionalism, as they — and the House Committee itself — would have one believe. They had taken part over the years in one step after another to disenfranchise one section after another of poor people or minorities, but they felt that the time wasn’t ripe for a coup. It was clear to them that the courts weren’t backing the Trumpist big lie that the 2020 election had been stolen, but they also knew that now the Supreme Court was split 6-3 in favor of extreme conservatism, and would back other forms of conservative dictation. The stand of the military leadership wasn’t clear, and that would be an obstacle to a coup. Moreover, Trump himself was indecisive, not willing to take any risk himself, and repeatedly backing down at critical times.
True, Trump not only lost the popular vote, but the electoral vote, and the Democrats held narrow edges in Congress. But many diehard conservatives could see which way things were going; they didn’t need a coup; they just needed a bit of patience. So even some officials who backed voter suppression, such as Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, wouldn’t falsify the vote count at Trump’s command.
It is said over and over again during the House hearings that it is important to prevent another January 6th. True enough. But preventing another violent insurrection is not the only thing necessary to prevent the imposition of conservative authoritarianism. The attempted coup of January 6th isn’t the only way to carry out a coup. There is another, slower way to achieve the same results, and it has been going on for some time. It uses the forms of legality to step-by-step gag dissent, suppress the demonstrations and organizations of the masses, and to turn the elections into sham. It involves voter suppression, gerrymandering, the support of the Trump generation of right-wing judges, and the mass replacement of poll workers and election officials by conservative fanatics. There is even talk of giving the state legislatures the right to appoint presidential electors as they will, no matter what the state’s voters decided.
Sources like PBS pretend that the only way to denounce Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen is to proclaim that the 2020 elections were totally fair and a model of democracy. This is repeated over and over. Yes, the votes were counted meticulously and the election officials stood their ground on that count. But it takes more than an accurate count to tell if the election is fair: among other things, there is the question of whether all citizens really can vote, or whether one obstacle after another is put in their way. There is also the issue of whether big money is allowed unfettered access to influence the election. There are also such things as that the conservative politician Kemp was allowed to supervise the election in Georgia in which he was running for Governor. These things were already taking place in 2020. True, there were some positive features of how the vote was carried out in 2020, such as the increase in the use of absentee balloting to deal with the pandemic. But overall, through Supreme Court decisions and a rash of actions by state legislatures, the elections are being biased ever more tightly to the conservatives and the bigots.
Bipartisanship isn’t going to be the solution to coups. Most of the Republican establishment was implicated in the coup or the cover-up. And among big-time state and national politicians, most anti-Trump conservatives, like Liz Cheney who is one of the only two Republicans on the January 6th Committee, are as reactionary as Trump. They just disagree with some of his methods.
In fact, the conservatives are getting closer and closer to carrying out their slow coup, whether they rally under Trump or another ultra conservative. For years, it seemed as if, no matter who won the elections, certain rights and social programs would continue, perhaps in a curtailed form. But this year, in the blink of an eye, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court not only eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, but stated its willingness to eliminate other long-standing rights. And if the conservatives do carry out their coup, we can expect a number of rapid changes.
Indeed, no matter who is indicted for Jan. 6th, it’s likely that the Democrats will be clobbered in the November elections. The Supreme Court decision on abortion has horrified millions of people, and this might help some Democratic candidates. But the Democratic program of bipartisanship is hardly likely to appeal to millions of people suffering from inflation and shortages. The Biden administration had boasted of enacting the child tax credit cutting child poverty in half, but that tax credit is gone. It talked about providing some relief on student debt, but it has done little on that front. It put Jerome Powell in office as the head of the Federal Reserve, and he is looking to austerity to solve inflation. And the establishment Democrats rely on politicking as usual, including tricks like financing ultra-right Republican candidates in the hope that they are easier to defeat than more moderate ones. (2) And given all the laws that have been passed recently in state legislatures, voter suppression will be worse in 2022 than in 2020.
As the conservatives edge toward control of all branches of government, we will see more repression. We are entering a period when everything will depend on how far mass struggle develops, and how far the working masses develop organization that can speak in its own name. This period is likely to cause a major readjustment in politics, as political forces that have lost any major support are likely to disappear, while major upheavals may occur as economic and environmental disasters intensify.
Today, there is no political party of any substantial size that really represents working class interests. While it is in the interest of the working masses to prevent conservative Republican domination of the government, this doesn’t mean that the Democrats are the people’s friends. Instead we are facing a protracted period of struggle; it will be a difficult time, but also one when many people see the true face of the bourgeoisie in all its ugliness.
The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has been working towards falsifying the vote for over two decades, and already in 2000 elevated its choice for president into office by blocking the completion of the recount in Florida. With the Trump appointees to the Supreme Court, there is now a 6-3 conservative majority that is even more shameless than in the past. It’s not that the liberal justices have been too good on economic decisions that affect the working masses, but the present hard conservative majority on the Supreme Court is championing a radical shift of the country towards bigotry and reaction.
Below is a partial list of some of the Supreme Court decisions that have paved the way for the current political crisis.
* 2000: in Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court held that it would do “irreparable harm” to George W. Bush’s legitimacy if the recount ordered in Florida continued. Presumably this was especially if he might have lost the recount. In a 5-4 decision, five conservative judges elevated a conservative to the presidency without the need to finish the vote counting. While there was a pretense that this wasn’t a “precedent”, it in fact opened the way for the court to interfere in a number of other elections. (3)
* 2008: There was the gutting of campaign finance laws, such as the Campaign Reform Act (Davis v. Federal Election Commission). Here the court threw out the so-called “Millionaires Amendment” that sought to even the playing field with millionaires. This part of the CRA allowed extra campaign financing from the public for candidates running against ultra-rich opponents who used their own money to flood the airwaves with their lies. In effect, the Court claimed that it would violate the free speech rights of millionaires to have other candidates able to answer them. That is, it wasn’t just the right of millionaires to spend as much as they wanted, but to spend more than other candidates.
* 2010: The Supreme Court gave the green flag for big money to flood in secret into any election in the infamous case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. It was followed by a deluge of “dark money” into elections, with deceptively-named committees allowed to hide the true source of their funds.
* 2013: There was the gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by the Supreme Court. In Shelby County v Holde, the Court threw out section 4(b) of the act which required “preclearance” of voter laws in states with a history of Jim Crow racism. The Supreme Court majority pretended that it believed that decision wouldn’t have much effect because the days of racism were supposedly in the past.
* June, 2022: The Supreme Court, in Dobbs v. Jackon Women’s Health Organization, not only denied a constitutional right to abortion but provided a rationale for removing other rights as well.
* Later in June, 2022: In West Virginia v. EPA, the Supreme Court stripped the EPA of most of its rights to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The court discovered a new rule, the “major questions doctrine”, that strips Congress of the right to delegate administrative action to government agencies whenever conservatives don’t like the regulations, such as environmental ones. In this way, the conservative Supreme Court majority has enacted a barrier to any serious regulation of the economy.
* 2022-3: The Supreme Court is set to rule on two new cases that involve whether state supreme courts can block legislative plans that bias elections in violation of their state’s constitutions. The court will likely deal with the “independent state legislature doctrine” that would allow state legislatures to do whatever they wish without review. So long as the majority of state legislatures doing this are expected to be conservative, the Court is likely to lean in their favor.
(1) Shayna Jacobs and Jose Dawsey, “Prosecutors in Trump Probe quit
after new DA seems to abandon plan to seek indictment of former
president”, The Washington Post, January 24, 2022.
(2) David Brooks, “Opinion: Why on Earth Is Pelosi Supporting the Trumpists?”, June 30, 2022, The New York Times.
(3) Ian MacDougall, “Why Bush v. Gore Still Matters in 2020”, Nov. 1, 2020, in Propublica. <>
Picture: “Panel to connect Proud Boys and Oath Keepers in Capitol
attack conspiracy”. <>
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