PAN and MC prepare a bloc in the Senate to stop judicial reform

Andrea Becerril

The newspaper La Jornada
Saturday, August 31, 2024, p. 5

Senators from Morena expressed confidence in reaching agreements with the opposition to gather the votes they need to approve the judicial reform, while the parliamentary groups of PAN and MC seek to act as a bloc to prevent it.

The vice-coordinator of the cherry-colored bench, Ignacio Mier, commented that they are confident that there will be more than 86 – the number required for the qualified majority – who will endorse this constitutional modification that will allow judges, magistrates and ministers to be elected at the polls, since, he said, it is the mandate of the people.

So far, only PAN and MC have made it clear that no votes for Morena would come from their ranks, but neither the PRI leader, Alejandro Moreno Cárdenas, nor the coordinator of that party in the Senate, Manuel Añorve, have commented on anything. They even avoided the press during the installation of the legislature, last Thursday, and there are versions that the coordinator of the Morena bench, Adán Augusto López Hernández, is negotiating with them..

PAN member Ricardo Anaya, who returned from three years of self-exile in the United States to his plurinominal seat, asked that none of the 43 opposition members do not bend or sell. In turn, the PRI member Manlio Fabio Beltrones responded that It doesn’t have to be thought about that he could give that vote to the majority group.

Likewise, the MC coordinator, Clemente Castañeda, warned that his bench will not act like strikebreakerssince the last electoral campaign their position was always against the judicial reform proposal of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, because they consider that It means a regression that would deeply hurt the country..

So, he added, We are not going to give up on what we believe is right.and warned that there is no basis for rumors that former PRD member Amalia García, current senator for MC, could move to Morena or vote with them.”

Meanwhile, Mier insisted that they are confident of convincing some of the opposition of the urgency of approving this reform that will allow the Judicial Branch to be cleaned up and move towards justice for all.

He explained that for almost 150 years the provisions of Article 39 of the Constitution were violated, which, he said, was last amended in 1857, “to establish that all public power comes from the people. For that reason, Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada y Reyes Vallarta, The Necromancer Ignacio Ramírez and Benito Juárez himself were elected as ministers of the Supreme Court.”

Later, he added, a procedure was established indirectly, no longer democratically, to designate him, which does not respond to the will of the people.