Deep Dive from @elreportero | Episode 5 | What would happen if the Mexican Supreme Court rejects the Judicial Reform?

El Reportero

And what if a suspension is granted that freezes the implementation of the judicial reform while the Supreme Court resolves the controversy?

This is a bit of a futurology exercise I did with lawyers and legal experts.

First of all, let’s start with a solid fact: with the reform, the justices of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) will be out of a job next year. They are guaranteed to be unemployed the following year.

So, under this principle and premise, there’s a possibility that they might have the guts and courage to declare the suspension of the judicial reform's implementation. After all, what do they have to lose if everything is already lost?

If this happens, then the National Electoral Institute (INE) would not be able to proceed with organizing the judicial elections for next year.

If this happens, given the positions we’ve seen entrenched between the three branches of government, we might think that the Executive and Legislative branches could reject this ruling and pressure the National Electoral Institute to proceed with the electoral process despite the Supreme Court’s rejection.

We would then be openly immersed in a constitutional crisis, and it raises the question: to which branch will the INE answer? The Executive, the Legislative, or the Judicial branch in order to make the elections legal or not?

At this moment, the Executive and Legislative branches have more real power than the Judicial branch because they have social legitimacy and control the state's coercive institutions.

This could happen because there are deficiencies in how the reform was approved, and also due to substantive issues, which, by the way, even Ricardo Monreal acknowledged yesterday, stating that it contains flaws and drafting problems.

So, the justices currently sitting in the Supreme Court would have to order the maintenance of the status quo, which would mean keeping the judges and, of course, the justices in their positions.

What would happen in that case?

Technically, the Executive would be empowered to send the police to remove them from office.

Yes, you heard right. The police would have to go arrest the judges and justices, especially the justices.

If the Executive decided to go to the extreme of sending the police to remove the justices from office, what would they do? In a surge of constitutional zeal, the justices might go so far as to chain themselves to their desks to avoid being removed by the police.

The mere thought of such an extreme scenario is frightening. A resistance by members of the Federal Judiciary, besides being a very radical confrontation, would carry significant political costs, especially on the international stage, against the administration of Claudia Sheinbaum, who has always claimed to believe in democracy, but in reality, her actions show the opposite.

I insist, of course, that this is an extreme scenario, but as I said at the beginning, what do the justices have to lose if they’re going to be out of a job next year anyway if the judicial reform stays as it is? They have every incentive to sacrifice themselves in a public spectacle and immolate themselves in the eyes of not just Mexicans but also international scrutiny.

Such a dramatic scenario would be a loss for Morena and Claudia Sheinbaum.

The constitutional lawyer I conducted this futurology exercise with emphasized that this would be an unthinkable extreme. But if Mexican history teaches us anything, it’s that the impossible happens with bizarre ease.

If something of this magnitude were to happen, the ousted justices would go down in history — for some — as heroes, but the true villains of this story would be the Morena party members, with Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo at the helm as the executioner of Mexican democracy.