This Supreme Court may not be supreme

Liberals and Progressives are pulling their hair out because the U.S. Supreme Court has reverted to being a conservative institution it has been for most of U.S. history. Some are calling for impeachment of the six certified conservative justices.

It should be remembered that the Supreme Court decided that slaves could not be free even if they escaped to a state where slavery wasn’t legal. That was the Dred Scott decision and it led directly to the American Civil War. Some people think the court was right.

In 1870, the court decided that states could not secede from the United States for the simple reason that the Constitution was clear as to how a territory could become a state but doesn’t mention how a state can leave the United States.

In 1897, an American born man named Wong Kim Ark traveled to China to visit relatives. On his return to San Francisco, he was denied reentry into the U.S. because Chinese (and all other Asians) were prohibited to enter the U.S. Wong Kim Ark petitioned the courts to allow him to return to the country he was born in because he was a citizen as per the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. The court agreed. Some people, like Donald Trump, disagree.

From the instant the U.S. was born in 1790 under the Constitution, the first immigration law of the new country limited immigrants to “a free white person.” Takao Ozawa was Japanese. That law would not pass muster today but it did in 1914.

In 1923, the court ruled that white didn’t apply to brown skin. An Indian born man from the Punjab, Bhagat Singh Thind, applied for citizenship in the state of Oregon where, it happens, Negroes were denied residency. He was granted American citizenship but was denied by immigration inspectors. He sued. The court decided that to be a

“free white person” one must not have “brown” skin. According to the Supreme Court, one not only had to be white but had to be “Caucasian.”

The Court, thus, has had friends and enemies on both sides of racial questions. But, generally, the populace has accepted the court’s various decisions and effects without much of a problem, except, of course, for the Civil War (18611865), in which 600,000 Americans died to prove the court wrong.

Now, if only Mexico would or could match that record. The problem is not caused by the Court but by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) who, in his wisdom, has created the “4th Transformation” of Mexico and his deep-rooted authoritarianism that dominates his waking hours. That is the problem.

AMLO has decided that the history-making worldwide accepted giant step towards democracy that Mexico took when it created the NATIONAL ELECTORAL INSTITUTE (INE), that it must go. He blames the INE of reverting back to his early political self by stealing the Presidency from AMLO in 2006. Felipe Calderon won the election with a small percentage of the initial count and the win was declared official when a recount of 16,000 voting districts confirmed Calderon’s victory.

Now, in 2023, AMLO has ordered the INE be emasculated and replaced with his own much smaller agency run by a directly-elected board of his own partisans from his personal political party, MORENA, an acronym for his “Regeneration” party.

Imagine a public agency paid for with taxes that is dominated by the President’s people counting votes in the 2024 Presidential election. The problem is that the President is bound to serve only one six-year term, period, no reelection. So what happens if he decides to run again and his people at the INE say it’s OK despite the (Mexican) Constitution. Who would then make the final decision? In the U.S., it would be the Supreme Court. In AMLO’s Mexico, however, it would be hand-chosen “achichincles” (gofers, party hacks). Why?

Because AMLO ignores court decisions that counter his orders. Dozens of judges have issued injunctions – what Mexico calls “amparos” – against projects AMLO has sponsored, like the new failed airport and the 1500-kilometer train AMLO ordered through the five impoverished southeastern states (including his home state), and a giant oil refinery he says is finished but won’t refine an ounce of oil for another 12 to 18 months.

American presidents usually honor Supreme Court decisions. Seventy-nine separate court appeals have been made opposing AMLO’s so-called electoral reform. Compounding the problem is the fact that AMLO’s personal appointment to the Mexican Supreme Court has been charged with plagiarism of her senior thesis forty years ago. She may lose her license to practice law as her thesis was the basis for her degree to begin with.

Will AMLO obey a court decision(s) against his electoral “reform?” Only he knows.