COMMENTARY The partisan leash Mexico's ruling party just clamped on the country's judiciary should be a warning that America's courts are also in the crosshairs of a president pushing loyalty over legality.
Mario Vargas Llosa must be scowling as he looks down from the writers’ afterlife this week.
And President Donald Trump must be smiling as he looks south from the U.S. this week.
Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian author and Nobel laureate who died in April, was famous for too many sage observations to count. But in my top ten was his description of Mexico as “the perfect dictatorship — because it’s disguised so as not to look like a dictatorship.”
He issued that quip in the 1990s, when Mexico was under the authoritarian thumb of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. (Talk about the perfect Orwellian name for the perfect dictatorship!) But it’s all too applicable now, under the thumb of the new ruling party, Morena — which just trashed whatever independence Mexico’s judicial branch had left in it.
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Last Sunday, Mexican President and Morena chieftain Claudia Sheinbaum presided over the election of nine Supreme Court justices and some 2,600 other federal, state and local judges. I use the word “election” very, very loosely because it felt a lot like the kind of sham democratic exercise the PRI used to conduct.
In fact, that’s what most genuine democrats are calling Sunday’s vote.
It was all part of Morena’s so-called reform of Mexico’s judiciary. Sheinbaum’s imperious predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, decided before leaving office last year that his country’s judges were ruling against his and Morena’s interests — blocking, for instance, his efforts to gut the autonomy of the National Electoral Institute — too often to be tolerated.
So he and the party, which also controls Mexico’s Congress, said those magistrates should be elected instead of appointed.
In Morena-speak, of course, that meant: elected in a way to ensure that every Supreme Court justice would be a faithful Morenista. Sunday’s balloting was designed to be so convoluted, for example, that only devoted Morena members really knew qué demonios was going on — which explains the laughable 13% turnout.
Now Mexico once again looks like Vargas Llosa’s dictadura perfecta.
Mexican justices stand to become so rubber-stamping they'll sign rulings as “Gumby" — the sort of jurists Trump sees banging gavels in his dreams.
Which is just America’s latest, if not loudest, reminder from Latin America that constitutional democracy — especially its crucial firewall, the judicial branch — can get hacked as easily as a cheap piece of anti-virus software.
Before Mexico we watched the likes of Venezuela, Nicaragua and El Salvador throw checks and balances under the bus — resulting in courts so rubber-stamping their justices now sign rulings as “Gumby.”
In other words, they’re the sort of jurists Trump sees banging gavels in his dreams.
Tariffs and deportations
As he keeps railing at the reality that he can’t ram unconstitutional tariffs and deportations by the U.S. courts as freely as he could once issue junk bonds to finance casinos — judges who defy him want “the Economic ruination of the United States of America!” he screamed on social media this week — Trump keeps showing us how Morenista he himself is.
Conservative New York Times columnist David French points out this week that the obstacle Trump faces in America is that even the judges he’s appointed — and, he believes, vetted for loyalty — tend to “place a higher priority on the respect of [their] peers than the applause” of the MAGA crowd. When there’s a “conflict between … legal principles and Trump’s demands,” French writes, the former thankfully still win out.
But a South Florida Sun-Sentinel editorial warns Trump appears to be searching more vigilantly now for judges who would prioritize president over principles — several here in South Florida.
One of them, the Sun-Sentinel fears, may be Ed Artau of the state’s Fourth District Court of Appeals in Palm Beach County, whom Trump just picked for a federal judgeship — after Artau wrote a gushingly pro-Trump opinion in one of Trump’s media defamation lawsuits.
Artau did not respond to the Sun-Sentinel’s request for comment on that concern — and whether he knew Trump was considering him for the federal bench when he wrote the opinion.
The same consideration should obviously apply to more liberal judges vis-à-vis Democratic presidents. But the point is that Trump, like Morena in Mexico, has made it clear he considers an independent judiciary one more personal affront that needs to be punished.
I just wish Vargas Llosa were still alive to describe the perfect constitutional storm that portends.
