Politics: Latest effort to stack the Supreme Court falls short, but AMLO and Sheinbaum prepare Plans C and D
There is no reason to believe that President López Obrador is going to abandon his longstanding campaign to bring the Judicial Branch under his control and, barring that, to hamstring it and starve it of funding. The latest effort in that latter regard is his administration’s attempt to dissolve all the trusts the Judiciary has maintained to cover personnel benefits, which is now before the courts. The Supreme Court has yet to rule on the constitutionality of the administration’s judicial reform measures.
But in the meantime, the AMLO administration appears focused on doing an end run around the current Supreme Court by making sure the president can once again count on the votes of at least four members of the High Court, who could then frustrate any efforts to declare his reforms unconstitutional. The opening salvo was the decision by former Chief Justice Arturo Zaldívar to resign, declare his devotion to the current government and join the team of virtual Morena presidential nominee Claudia Sheinbaum. That leaves a 15 year-long seat on the bench that AMLO is in a position to fill and a possible Sheinbaum administration figure likely getting to sit on the High Court roughly a year from now. The question that remains is just how successful the Morena camp is likely to be in its long-term effort to disempower this last major counterweight to its unconstitutional designs.
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