in Argentina. As in the United States, the constitutional role
of the Supreme Court would also be challenged in
Argentina. In 1946 Juan Domingo Perón was
democratically elected president of Argentina. Perón was a
former colonel and had first come to national prominence
after a military coup in 1943, which had appointed him
minister of labor. In this post, he built a political coalition
with trade unions and the labor movement, which would be
crucial for his presidential bid.
Shortly after Perón’s victory, his supporters in the
Chamber of Deputies proposed the impeachment of four of
the five members of the Court. The charges leveled against
the Court were several. One involved unconstitutionally
accepting the legality of two military regimes in 1930 and
1943—rather ironic, since Perón had played a key role in
the latter coup. The other focused on legislation that the
court had struck down, just as its U.S. counterpart had
done. In particular, just prior to Perón’s election as
president, the Court had issued a decision ruling that
Perón’s new national labor relations board was
unconstitutional. Just as Roosevelt heavily criticized the
Supreme Court in his 1936 reelection campaign, Perón did
the same in his 1946 campaign. Nine months after initiating
the impeachment process, the Chamber of Deputies
impeached three of the judges, the fourth having already
resigned. The Senate approved the motion. Perón then
appointed four new justices. The undermining of the Court
clearly had the effect of freeing Perón from political
constraints. He could now exercise unchecked power, in
much the same way the military regimes in Argentina did
before and after his presidency. His newly appointed
judges, for example, ruled as constitutional the conviction of
Ricardo Balbín, the leader of the main opposition party to
Perón, the Radical Party, for disrespecting Perón. Perón
could effectively rule as a dictator.
Since Perón successfully packed the Court, it has
become the norm in Argentina for any new president to
handpick his own Supreme Court justices. So a political
institution that might have exercised some constraints on
the power of the executive is gone. Perón’s regime was
removed from power by another coup in 1955, and was
followed by a long sequence of transitions between military