From blocking the INAI to the electoral 'plan b': López Obrador's pending accounts with the Supreme Court

Andrés Manuel López Obrador greets Norma Piña, during a public event in Mexico City, on February 9, 2023.Galo Cañas Rodríguez (Cuartoscuro)

The tension between the Government and the Judiciary began as an underground battle as soon as Andrés Manuel López Obrador came to power. Despite not being a campaign promise, the president proposed among his priority objectives to clean the Judiciary of corruption and superfluous expenses. During the first years, the frictions had a key mediator: Arturo Zaldívar, the president of both the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) and the Council of the Judiciary, the governing body of the judges. But with the relay at the top of the judiciary, the channel has run wild. The arrival to the presidency of Minister Norma Piña, earlier this year, has coincided with an escalation of the political dispute between the Morena government and the judges. And especially, the Supreme Court. It has also increased because the Court has been deciding, and in many cases knocking down, several important issues for President López Obrador in the last four months, some that had even been unresolved for months, such as the operational and administrative control at the hands of the Mexican Army of the National Guard (the corporation created for internal security tasks).

This week, on May 8, the country's highest court knocked down a part of the electoral "plan b" of the López Obrador government, which is a set of reforms to electoral laws that were presented after the ruling party legislators could not carry out an electoral reform to the Constitution due to lack of a qualified majority in the Mexican Congress. The measure by the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation has provoked the discontent of the federal administration and the politicians and militants of Morena. From President López Obrador, who has mocked the minister president of the Court and has instructed cabinet members not to answer "even the phone" to ministers, through a wave of criticism from Moreno deputies and legislators, to a permanent sit-in of followers of the federal president outside the SCJN building. In addition, the ministers who have developed the projects to be analyzed and voted, together with the minister president, have been victims of threats and harassment on social networks.

The ministers of the Court during the session in which they invalidated a part of the "plan B" of the electoral reform, on May 8. SCJN (Cuartoscuro)

Many of the president's priority initiatives have ended up in the court of the Court as a result of challenges against the legislative processes that were carried out to approve them in the Mexican Congress. The Morena legislators, the ruling party, and their allied parties (Green Party and Labor Party) control the simple majority in both chambers, so, not having enough quorum to modify the Constitution, they have decided to take parliamentary detours without having the consensus of the other political forces. This strategy of Morena has provoked an avalanche of challenges to the high court for violation of procedures. In some cases, the reforms went ahead in a few days or even hours and without even reading the opinions of the initiatives.

When it came to studying the validity of the changes to the General Law of Social Communication and the General Law of Administrative Responsibilities, for example, nine of the eleven ministers that make up the Court were harsh with the way in which the Chamber of Deputies and the Chamber of Senators approved the changes to both laws. "A genuine constitutional legislative procedure was not carried out. The set of vices and errors in the legislative function are of such magnitude that they result in what I would call a perversion of democratic rules. Endorsing a legislative procedure with these features would be equivalent to assuming that the parliamentary majority, by the simple fact of being so, is above constitutional rules, which seems inadmissible to me," said Minister Luis María Aguilar.

#ConferenciaPresidente | Tuesday, May 9, 2023 pic.twitter.com/QVzJ4JYa46

— Government of Mexico (@GobiernoMX) May 10, 2023

Issues like this, important for the López Obrador government, continue and will continue to reach the Court in the last year and a half that remains to the administration of the Tabasco politician. The Mexican High Court will have to rule in the next two months on the appointments of three commissioners of the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (INAI), which have not been carried out due to the refusal of Morena senators to make the appointments, which are necessary for the body to operate at its maximum capacity. The case has been taken all the way to the Court, since making the appointments is an action established in the Constitution.

There could also be a barrage of challenges against the approval of 20 priority initiatives for the president and his party. The senators of Morena, Green Party and Labor Party endorsed in less than five hours 20 reforms, without reading the opinions and without discussing them. Most of those bills reached the Senate on a Monday and five days later they had passed the entire legislative process that normally takes weeks.

An effigy of Norma Piña during a public gathering convened by López Obrador, in Mexico City, on March 18, 2023. Rodrigo Oropeza

With this rispidity between the Executive Branch and the head of the Judicial Branch in Mexico, the 2024 elections are approaching, in which not only the next president of the country will be elected, but the 628 places that make up the Congress will be renewed. And from now on, President López Obrador has begun to call his followers (the president has a high approval rating of around 60% of the population) so that Morena obtains the qualified majority necessary to carry out constitutional reforms. Among them, he has threatened to present an initiative that he had never talked about: one that allows the ministers of the Court to be elected by popular vote. To justify his new proposal, he has stated: "The Judiciary is rotten."

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