Opinion: Need to reform the Supreme Courtroom? These strongmen can present a factor or two

Mac Margolis is a longtime reporter, columnist and scriptwriter protecting Latin America, and writer of The Final New World: the Conquest of the Amazon Frontier.

When the political opposition, unbiased election observers and scores of worldwide leaders cried foul over Venezuela’s July 28 elections, plunging the nation into turmoil, self-proclaimed victor President Nicolás Maduro knew simply what to do. He pledged to “throw myself before justice.”

In any democracy worthy of the identify, that will be the honorable factor to do. Besides this was the Bolivarian Republic, the place 25 years of authoritarian catch and kill have rendered the Supreme Courtroom and just about all different governing establishments appendages of the person within the Miraflores Palace.

Caracas is a great distance from Capitol Hill. However earlier than the champions of sweeping Supreme Courtroom reform within the U.S. fall too far down that rabbit gap, they’d do nicely to contemplate the document of countries which have been there. Look no additional than Latin America.

Honors to Venezuela, the place courtroom packing and purging, amongst different variations of institutional reengineering, have been mainstays of the quarter-century scandal referred to as Chavismo. That’s shorthand for the state-sponsored assault the late Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s president from 1999 to 2013, waged on constitutional checks and balances that not solely gutted considered one of South America’s flagship democracies but additionally hastened the worst financial collapse within the Americas in current reminiscence.

Then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, accompanied by his spouse Marisabel Rodríguez de Chávez, waves to supporters as he arrives to preside over a parade in his honor on Feb. 4, 1999. Hugo Chávez died in 2013.

Bertrand Parres/AFP through Getty Pictures

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Bertrand Parres/AFP through Getty Pictures

It could be foolish to conflate the authoritarian designs of strongman Chávez and his protégé and successor Maduro with the marketing campaign to curb U.S. judicial extra. Certainly, final month, President Biden plausibly known as for a code of conduct and time period limits for the Supreme Courtroom after head-turning ethics controversies and the excessive courtroom’s obvious jag to the fitting underneath former President Donald Trump. But it’s price recalling that Venezuela’s descent into rank illiberalism additionally began with one of the best of democratic intentions.

Rewind to 1999, when the just lately seated President Chávez convened a constituent meeting to rewrite the structure with ensures of an unbiased judiciary and an autonomous Supreme Courtroom. The brand new constitution even included a fail-safe empowering congress, by supermajority, to disbar any excessive courtroom justice discovered to have dedicated “serious offenses.” Human Rights Watch’s Americas director on the time, José Miguel Vivanco, described that initiative as one meant “to enshrine the principle of judicial independence in a new democratic constitution.”

That lullaby ended with a pen stroke in 2004 when Chávez’s congressional majority supersized the Supreme Courtroom, increasing the excessive bench from 20 to 32 members, a transfer tailor-made to maintain the courts secure for autocracy.

Certainly, there’s a straight line from that top-down judicial reset to the risible outcomes of final month’s presidential election that Maduro claims to have gained, after disqualifying the main opposition contender and ignoring calls to publish the electoral tallies. All of this with the imprimatur of a domesticated legislature, the captured Nationwide Electoral Council and a packed Supreme Courtroom. By no means thoughts that each one credible exit polls and vote tallies posted by Maduro’s challengers level to a landslide victory by opposition candidate Edmundo González.

Venezuela has firm. Since 2010 a roster of Latin American elected “antidemocrats” — in Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Bolivia and El Salvador — has elided, eroded or just flouted constitutional constraints on govt authority, in keeping with V-Dem, a gaggle at Sweden’s College of Gothenburg that displays democracies worldwide. Regulatory businesses, congress, the central financial institution and public auditors — all have been legitimate targets. Particularly the courts.

“Independent and empowered courts are a blockage to elected anti-democrats who seek to control other institutions with a veneer of legality,” V-Dem concluded. “With the court on their side, the constitutionality of their undemocratic moves is undisputed.”

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele gestures through the inauguration of the Knowledge Belief expertise heart in Ciudad Arce, El Salvador, on July 16.

Marvin Recinos/AFP through Getty Pictures

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Marvin Recinos/AFP through Getty Pictures

Few caudillos, as regional strongmen are recognized, understood this higher than El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. In 2021, the soi-disant “world’s coolest dictator” (since rebranded because the “philosopher king”), leveraged his rock-star approval scores to forcibly retire one-third of the nation’s magistrates. His congressional allies went on to approve abstract dismissal of all sitting judges aged 60 or over and swap out all of the justices on the Constitutional Courtroom. The rationale? To “purify” the judicial system and clear the best way for Bukele to hunt a constitutionally barred reelection.

Even the extra democratic-minded leaders have succumbed to overstepping. Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva styled his return to the presidency in January 2023 as a mandate to rescue democratic establishments. Now he routinely threatens a type of establishments, the Central Financial institution, for preserving rates of interest excessive amid his authorities’s fiscal incontinence. Then there’s Mexico’s outgoing populist and wannabe caudillo, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who’s pushing a crowd-pleasing regulation to require all judges be elected by fashionable vote, together with to the Supreme Courtroom.

By 2023, Latin America and the Caribbean had fallen for eight years working on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Democracy Index, which tracks democratic resilience globally.

If there’s a caveat for the alpha nation within the Americas, it’s that, as soon as indulged, the temptation to meddle with courts, justices and regulatory businesses is difficult to withstand, and may simply give method to overreach and revanchism. Even the hemisphere’s headline antidemocrats prefaced their postelection energy grabs with completely salutary calls to appropriate course, root out corruption and preempt abuse.

When discuss of overhauling the U.S. Supreme Courtroom resurfaced 4 a long time in the past, the then-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee dismissed it as a “a bonehead idea.” At present, Biden is an fanatic, as are his chosen successor, Vice President Harris, some 30 fellow Democrats and a public opinion groundswell.

Tellingly, the identical survey that tracked Latin America’s slide into illiberalism additionally painted the U.S. as a “flawed democracy.” The jury remains to be out on how that may end up on either side of the equator.