Mexico’s Senate voted 85-41 in favor of amending the Constitution to prevent the courts from reviewing, challenging, or suspending legislation passed by Congress on 25 October 2024. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s party, Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (Morena), secured the votes as the ruling coalition. Morena simultaneously approved the removal of the Supreme Court’s power to hear challenges filed against changes to the Constitution.

According to reporting from the Financial Times, legal analysts fear this move of legislative supremacy gravely erodes Mexico’s transition to a democracy with greater checks and balances. The Financial Times wrote that since the start of Sheinbaum’s time in office, the Mexican peso has depreciated against the dollar by 15% in part because of the uncertainty and risk Sheinbaum’s reforms pose to the country’s future. 

Protests of this change come from Mexican lawmakers from the opposition National Action Party (P.A.N.). Bloomberg reported that opposition leader Senator Guadalupe Murguia Gutierrez said during the debate against the amendment that “Morena seeks an authoritarian government” and a turn back toward a dictatorship. 

In a shocking move, P.A.N. party senator Miguel Angel Yunes Marquez changed his position. “In the most difficult decision of my life,” Marquez said on the debate floor, “I have decided to vote in favor of the bill to create a new model for the administration of justice.”

A legacy of authoritarian features in Mexico’s government can be seen in Sheinbaum’s mentor, Morena founder and former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Bloomberg wrote that Mexico’s Supreme Court was once the only listener to investors’ frustrations with the Obrador Administration and their only shield from when the government would arbitrarily threaten to jail people accused of tax fraud, for example – now that protection is effectively gone.

This major vote comes during a time of judicial chaos and turmoil when one month prior, the Senate voted to pass Obrador’s plan to have judges be elected through popular voting by Mexican citizens instead of the appointment-based system. The New York Times reported that approximately 7,000 judges across the judicial system will be expected to run under the new plan, and this new voting process could see many of those positions filled with people who have inadequate training and a decrease in qualification standards.

“Now it’s different,” Obrador said in a video he posted to social media on 15 September 2024, with Sheinbaum next to him. “Now it’s the people who rule, the people who decide.”

The N.Y.T. analyzed data from government surveys which found 66 percent of Mexicans perceive judges to be corrupt and rife with nepotism, but 50,000 judges and court workers alongside law experts, students, opposition political members, and investors still protested the plan. With Sheinbaum’s recent win and Obrador’s plan in full effect, the Supreme Court and judicial system’s power writ large has disintegrated significantly. The new amendment is expected to pass the lower house with flying colors where a Morena-led alliance holds a strong majority.