Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments in Mexico: The Failure of the Guardians of the Constitution and its Implications for Constitutional Hyper-Reformism

Abstract

In the field of comparative constitutional law scholars have agreed on the potential of constitutional courts to enforce democratic limitations to the political branches in new or fragile democracies. For instance, one of the ways in which constitutional courts have stopped or failed to stop tendencies to what has been called abusive constitutionalism is through the exercise of judicial review of constitutional amendments. Mexico's constitutional change reality appears as a good candidate to have a court enforcing democratic limitations to the excessive use of constitutional amendment—the constitution has gone through over 690 amendments. Yet, despite the perfect conditions (formal empowerment and power fragmentation) for becoming a strong constitutional tribunal able to exert its authority vis-a-vis the political branches, the Supreme Court has consistently refused to engage in judicial review of constitutional amendments. This paper examines how the Mexican Supreme Court has treated the claims against constitutional amendments in the last four decades and suggests how its doctrinal stance on this issue is related to the parallel phenomena of constitutional hyper-reformism.