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- cross-posted to:
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Mexico is poised to amend its constitution this weekend to require all judges to be elected as part of a judicial overhaul championed by the outgoing president but slammed by critics as a blow to the country’s rule of law.
The amendment passed Mexico’s Congress on Wednesday, and by Thursday it already had been ratified by the required majority of the country’s 32 state legislatures. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said he would sign and publish the constitutional change on Sunday.
Legal experts and international observers have said the move could endanger Mexico’s democracy by stacking courts with judges loyal to the ruling Morena party, which has a strong grip on both Congress and the presidency after big electoral wins in June.
Probably. You’re now going to have judges raising money to campaign. And the average on-the-street voter knows fuck-all about what qualifies somebody to be a judge, so they’re unlikely to pick better candidates.
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A judgeship is not a “political office.” Yes yes yes, I know - I hear you clicking the “reply” button, but it’s not supposed to be. And by making them directly voted on they they definitely will be.
I’m going to preface this with “none of these problems are solved by either options but some things are better in some situations than in others.” There is no silver bullet.
But - I want you to imagine a scenario: A judge wants to be on the supreme court.
Scenario 1: Big Evil Co. starts up a PAC that spends billions on getting that judge elected and they win. Big Evil Co. has business before the court and threatens to dissolve the PAC when the judge comes up for election again. Maybe PACs are illegal in Mexico - I don’t know, but they can find some way to fund campaigns since they’re often expensive ordeals.
Scenario 2: An elected official who was chosen by the people (sometimes the good people, sometimes “those other guys”) nominates somebody for office. They are chosen by other elected officials. Now when Big Evil Co. comes before the court they don’t have many options. They can bribe or give gifts. But they can’t really effect whether that judge remains on the bench. And such actions are often deeply looked down upon or outright illegal.
In Australia the legal establishment selects a shortlist of suitability qualified candidates to the government for our version of the Supreme Court (our High Court). The government makes a choice. In all cases both political parties generally are fine with the choice. Both sides occasionally gets the rough end of the pineapple in court decisions, but that’s the law, not political bias.
Watching what goes on the in US is a horror show. Heart goes out to you guys.
We have a strong “anti-expertise” streak going on at the moment, and it’s painful to watch. “Trust experts to select judges? What do they know?”
It’s a problem, and I have no idea what has led to it.
I hear you, but that system has worked well for us since federation in 1901. It’s not perfect, but what system is? At least we have never witnessed the absolute crazy judicial stuff that is an ongoing mess in the US.
Believe me, I’m not attacking the US in any way. The world needs America to succeed. America needs America to succeed, but every SCOTUS decision is crazy. Even political gerrymandering is permitted in the land of the free, according to your Supreme Court.
I deleted my comment, not really in the mood to argue the many flaws of the judicial system today.
But it’s noteworthy that I don’t believe such a thing as “rule of law” is ever achievable without corruption and that there exist only varying degrees of corruption but more or less every judicial system on earth is corrupt to some extent. I made a much longer writeup responding to you, but again, I felt that I’d rather not spend my day arguing this.
Long and short, the only way the current system works is if you assume that all politicians are acting in good faith and that all voters have equal political power. Neither of these is true on a foundational level, and that is reflected in widespread corruption and manipulation of appointed judges.
I didn’t think we were “arguing” - just a discussion. You’re right that there is no such thing as “rule of law” without corruption. Or government without corruption. Or a fantasy soccer league without corruption. etc. All human things are corrupted by bad people.
The point is not to remove corruption completely, which isn’t possible, but to minimize it and make it less effective.
So do judges that oppose these. Meanwhile in a racist or misogynist electorate judges will be compelled to cater to those “values”
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What qualifies someone to be a judge is simply redefined to be what is popular. A judge should therefore no longer follow the law, but make the ruling most in line with what is popular. Under a voting system that is the sole qualifier.
Which is what the legislature is for.
Yikes. That’s an insanely misguided worldview.
Do you know what was real popular for centuries? Fucking slavery.
Popularity, like legality, is independent of morality. We should be striving to better understand how to improve the well-being of everyone, and use that information to legislate what is moral based on that ultimate goal. Popularity should not figure into this at all.
Slavery looks a lot more popular when you don’t let the slaves vote. If the slaves could vote – i.e. if there was a greater degree of democracy – there would surely be no slavery. It was the repression of the political power of a large segment of the population that enabled slavery.
Surely, if we educate people on class consciousness, they will generally act in alignment with the common interest, right prole? Certainly it’s not a better solution to dictate morality to them unilaterally through some technocratic institution (that’s rather like what the aristocracy was), because we have no particular way of ensuring that they will act in the common interest – which is not especially their interest – unlike the common people, for whom the common interest is their interest.