The building of the supreme court of justice of the nation / csjn
The disobedience of President Alberto Fernández to the ruling of the Supreme Court that restored funds to the City of Buenos Aires is, obviously, a fight for money. But, above all, it is a power dispute never seen before. A political battle not so much against the mayor of Buenos Aires, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, accused by the national government of being almost the paradigm of disdain for federalism, but one more chapter in the saga raised by Kirchnerism against a Judiciary that, after years of accommodative opacities, he decided to assert his status as guarantor of the republican system of government.
The Court, which is the head of that State power, is also the last step offered by the National Constitution to evaluate the legitimacy of the government acts of the other two powers. In this case, from a measure of the Executive branch taken in September 2020, which unilaterally took tax sharing points from one district, the Federal Capital, to give them to another, the Province of Buenos Aires.
It is not a matter of establishing in this file whether the percentage that the province governed by Axel Kicillof receives from the co-participating tax pie is fair based on what it contributes, from which the other districts benefit. It clearly isn’t, but that’s a separate discussion. Here it was analyzed whether what the President did with that scythe was right, at the time pressured by Cristina and Máximo Kirchner.
Force institutionality
Fernández has chosen to go beyond the limits that he knows perfectly well from his status as a Law professor, forcing the institutional framework to the extreme point. In short, the President chose a role in history that will place him, appealing to his own historical analysis of his past anti-Christian stage, in the camp of those who consider that the principle of the division of powers is an archaic concept, to relativize .
Beyond the judicial counterattack implemented by the Government, Alberto has been left within a shot of contempt, uprising, disobedience and breach of the duties of a public official which, by the way, has already earned him two criminal complaints and it is almost sung that they will be translated legislatively in requests for impeachment against him.
He also gave Rodríguez Larreta invaluable material for his patient construction as a “rational” opposition presidential candidate, a race in which his internal rivals had put him on a par more for good looks than for scrolls. “The President wants to break the constitutional order, completely violate the rule of law and attack democracy,” the mayor ranted yesterday without losing control. Almost that he names Alberto his campaign manager.
For Fernández, in addition, the persistence in not complying with the Court’s ruling would represent a direct action of alignment with Cristina’s strategy – strictly speaking, a modus operandi – of ignoring the orders of the highest Court. The Vice President had disobeyed the ruling that ordered the Senate in her charge to nominate certain opposition legislators to the Council of the Magistracy, the body that proposes and controls judges. The President had accompanied that attitude from the declarative, he could not do otherwise. He now acted with the same dubious Republican criteria.
What is notable is that he does not seem to do it out of personal empathy, because the relationship between him and his vice is currently icy. It was not surprising, then, that of the “scrum” of 18 governors who adhered to the statement against the Court, it was the Cristinistas Kicillof and Capitanich (Chaco) who acted as operators of the rest of the Justicialist provinces and, in a certain way, introduced the idea that the decision of the courtiers obeys more a political-partisan criterion than a judicial one.
It was heard from the ruling party that the Court seeks to “finance” Larreta’s campaign or that this is a court “typical of the dictatorship” (Senator Oscar Parrilli verbatim), when Peronism voted for each of its current members, including the last two proposed by former President Macri. Verbal fireworks have no limits.
It would also have been the idea of the leaders the strategy of crushing the concept that the Court’s ruling obeys a sort of “Hood Robin” logic: that it takes from the poorest to give to the richest. The Court considered false the idea that restoring the funds to the CABA implies taking money from the “cup” to the other provinces because the percentages they receive will not vary. The reason: the funds for the Buenos Aires district must come from the part of the tax collection that the Nation keeps for itself and not from those that are distributed (pages 26 and 27 of the ruling). In any case, the national State would be the “harmed”.
Kirchnerism always warns. It was Cristina who suggested first of all, just taking office as Vice President, on December 12, 2019, that the new government would go for the Buenos Aires funds. She said it like this: “In the Capital even the ferns have light and water, while in the Conurbano they splash in water and mud.” And she warned that the time had come to discuss “these issues”.
Less than a year later and without discussing anything, Alberto removed part of the funds from the CABA to allocate them, supposedly, to a salary increase for the Buenos Aires Police, which had been quartered by Axel. It was what marked the end of a relationship that appeared quite civilized with Rodríguez Larreta, marked by the need to combat the Covid pandemic, and which promised to bring some good sense to politics.
“The President wants to break the constitutional order,” said Larreta
Cristina suggested in December 2019 that the Government would go for the Buenos Aires funds
