Eagle Pass

Republi-Fascist Neo-Nullificaton v. Federal State Authoity at the Southern Texas Border

Dear readers: I’ll put up Parts 2 and 3 of my series titled “In Defense of Bob Avakian and the Revcoms” in coming days but first I want to publish the following reflections on a remarkable and so far underestimated story unfolding now in Republi-fascist Texas….

Those who laugh off the notion that the United States could descend into something somewhat or very much like a civil war pitting the authoritarian Republi-fascist sections, states, and forces of the country against the late bourgeois democratic and rule of law sections, states, and forces of the country might want to look at the remarkable situation developing in Eagle Pass, Texas.

Right now, at this very moment, Eagle Pass is site for an armed showdown pitting the nativist, Christian Republi-fascist governor of Texas, Greg Abbott  against the US federal government under the listless Democratic Party president Joe Biden.  In a park along the Rio Grande, National Guard soldiers under Abbott’s command are facing down federal troops in a struggle that has massive implications for the legitimacy of the nation’s federal-state constitutional set-up.  

For the last week,  Texas National Guard troops have blocked US  Border Patrol agents from entering a patch of the US-Mexico border where a large number of migrants have crossed. 

The White House and its US Department of Homeland Security want to remove lethal razor wire and other barriers that Texas has put up to block migration. The Biden administration cites threats to migrants’ safety as a major concern behind its attempted intervention. It does so with good reason. As local southern Texas media report:

“On Jan. 12, a woman and two children drowned in the [Rio Grande] river after members of the Texas Military Department denied U.S. border authorities access to give humanitarian aid to the group, which were found in distress [near] a migrant processing center [that] was recently seized by the Texas Military Department on orders from Gov. Greg Abbott … U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, who represents the district neighboring Eagle Pass, spoke to PBS Newshour about the incident: ‘…if they would have just allowed the Border Patrol to do its work, we would not be talking about…[how] a mother and an 8-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy…drowned, as other ones have drowned.’”

The White House calls Abbott’s lethal military moves to bolster the border “cruel, inhumane and dangerous.”

At the heart of this extraordinary confrontation in Eagle Pass (and more broadly on the southern Texas/US border) is a brazen attempt by Abbot and his Republi-fascist Party to undercut the authority of the federal government.

This is no small matter.  For the first time in six decades, a US governor is defying the authority of the national government not merely with words but with the real threat of  force. As Huffington Post reports:

“Abbott’s declaration that that the Biden administration had ‘broken the compact between the United States and the States’ by failing to ‘fulfill the duties’ of protecting Texas from an ‘invasion’ is an eerie echo of the political thought that gave rise to nullification and secession in the 19th century and resistance to desegregation in the 20th.”

The Texas Military Department and its far-right commander Abbott are defying not just the US president but also the US Supreme Court, itself divided along with the entire US judiciary between fascist and nonfascist elements. Three days ago, a divided high court issued a one-page order directing Texas’s fascist governor to let federal forces into Eagle Pass while a lawsuit over the matter between the Department of Homeland Security and  Texas carries on in lower courts.

The order removed an injunction imposed by the Fifth Circuit US Court of Appeals, which forbade federal authorities from removing the barriers at Eagle Pass. The Fifth Circuit is a notorious Federalist Society bastion of Christian Republi-fascism, closely allied with Abbott’s war on abortion, civil rights, and immigration, and with “red” (try brown as in brownshirts) Republi-fascist states effort to challenge the power of the supposedly leftist (LOL) federal government.    .

The Supreme Court’s order was opposed by four of its five Christian fascist members: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.  Only Amy Coney-Barrett held back.

Abbott and his party’s overlord Herr Trump could give a flying fuck about rulings that contravene their neo-Nazi Amerikaner-fascist agenda. Fresh from big caucus and primary victories in Iowa and New Hampshire – clear demonstrations that the formerly republican and now Republi-fascist Party is his plaything three years after January 6 – the now openly Hitlerian Trump channels Mein Kampf by calling his “Marxist” political enemies “vermin” and saying that nonwhite immigrants “poison the blood of our country.” He is quite naturally aligned with his fellow far-right nativist Abbott, who packs migrants into buses and dumps them in blue state cities.

Recall that Trump as US president told US Border Patrol agents that he’d pardon them if they shot asylum-seekers, called for electrified border fences, and told one of his hate rallies that he loved the image of migrants running in fear from “big snarling German Shepherds.”

Meanwhile, with white nationalist Fatherland/FOX News putting on Republi-fascist politicos absurdly accusing Biden of being “allied with the big Mexican drug cartels” (!) the Malignant Orange Menace is using his grip over the  Republi-fascist party to make the far right-controlled US House block Senate Republicans from “working with Democrats” to secure a “deal” the upper chamber’s Republicans call “a once-in-a-generation opportunity for a conservative border security bill.” So what if the fascism-appeaser Joe Biden is ready to conciliate the rightmost major party’s border revanchism to keep the American Empire properly equipped for fomenting war and genocide abroad?  Dear Leader Donald demands the denial of any perceived bipartisan victories for his 2024-25 presidential opponent.  The Trumpified House Republi-fascists’ mission  is to prevent any “normal” parliamentary resolution on this and other issues, feeding chaos meant to grease the skids for Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump’s return to power.

Don’t look for Biden to do what Dwight Eisenhower did when Arkansas’ racist Governor Orval Faubus defied federal rulings on public school desegregation in 1957: send in the US military to demonstrate the supreme power of federal over state government. “Genocide” Joe  is a brazen backer of fascism in Israel/Palestine and a chickenshit appeaser of fascism in the United States.  He will not likely heed the call of some Texas Democrats for him to (in Yahoo News’ words) “seize control of the Texas National Guard and make it comply with a recent Supreme Court order allowing the president’s administration to remove razor wire set up by Texas along the U.S.-Mexico border.” That’s just not who Weimar Joe Biden is, as we have seen in many instances including his despicably lame response to the Supreme Court decision ending women’s constitutional right to an abortion.

Meanwhile and as usual, nobody “red”  or blue in the mainstream US media and politics culture says one word about the historical-material taproot of the southern border crisis: US-led capitalism-imperialism’s longstanding and ongoing bipartisan ruination of the lives of masses of human beings in Central and South America.