Carlos Jijon
Guayaquil, Ecuador
The Constitutional Court it has destroyed the idea that the institution of the cross death empowered a President of the Republic to govern by decree if he was forced to dissolve an obstructionist National Assembly, as was understood to be the spirit of the Constitution.
In a resolution last week, The Court has attributed the power, which the Constitution confers to the President, to determine if the emergency decree law is really emergent, and not as it was understood, that his role was that of a guardian of the Constitution, which had to ensure that the Executive could not cross the line. The limit was the Constitution. And it will be the next National Assembly, the one that settles in the early elections, the one that decides whether to revoke or maintain that exceptional legislation.
What the Court has done is blow up that period of exception, stripping the President of the Republic of his ability to exercise power and turning him into a mere spectator of the electoral process. From now on, presidents must know that their power ends when they dissolve Congress, and that they will remain subject, hostage, to the discretion of judges who do not answer for their actions.
In doing so, the Constitutional Court seems to have assumed not only the role of counterweight to the Executive, as expressly mentioned in the text of its resolution, but particularly that which corresponds to an opposition that considers that its duty is to paralyze the Government.
The doctors discuss whether or not the Constitutional Court exercises a role as a political actor in the context of democratic institutions. That discussion has been surpassed by the current Court, once considered the best in recent decades, which has confirmed itself before the country as a major league political player. And they have given the go-ahead to a tax reform to reduce taxes, expressly acknowledging its urgency, because it would have been totally unpopular to deny it. And at the same time they deny an investment decree law that would allow us to face the serious problem of unemployment.
Why is it urgent to lower taxes and not provide solutions to the employment problem? Has the Court made a political analysis or a constitutional one? Do the magistrates realize the great damage they cause to their own institutions by acting as politicians instead of as judges?
The worst thing is that they are very bad politicians, incapable of understanding the future that lies ahead as a consequence of their own actions. By playing politicians, they gave way to an interpellation to the President of the Republic, which has led us to the current circumstance that it is most likely that, before the end of this year, correísmo will have returned to power. Do you think they will be respected? Don’t you remember how the previous Constitutional Court ended, when its magistrates had to flee from the mobs that attacked the headquarters where they were, lynched with a stick, for disagreeing with the line of the government of the revolution?
Myopic. deluded. The gown is too big for them, to put it in the words of the former president of that same Court, Dr. Hernán Salgado.
The Constitutional Court has given way to a popular consultation to leave Yasuní oil underground, which can cause the loss of about $1.5 billion a year in oil exports when the world seems on the verge of a global recession. Then he has denied an investment decree law that sought to make the country more attractive to foreign investment.
At the end of the day, they have not only paved the way for the return of authoritarianism, but have also hindered the pursuit of well-being for citizens. And most likely it is responsible for an economic debacle. It has been a very bad Constitutional Court for the country.
The essential thing, wrote the French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar in the middle of the last century, is that a man who has come to power shows later that he deserved to exercise it. The magistrates of the Constitutional Court, with two or three exceptions, have shown that they did not deserve to be.
Quito, March 24, 2023. In the Constitutional Court, the Draw of the judge who will take the cause of impeachment against President Guillermo Laso was carried out. The judge drawn was Teresa Nuques Martinez API / DANIEL MOLINEROS