Menem expands Argentina's Supreme Court

In 1990, Carlos Saúl Menem expanded Argentina’s Supreme Court from five members to nine and appointed four new justices, giving his government a majority. The measure was presented partly as a response to an overworked court, but it also continued a political pattern in which executives altered the judiciary to reduce constraints on their power. Its importance lay not only in who gained seats, but in how readily a democratic government repeated a practice associated with earlier authoritarian rule.

Background: a weakened judicial check

The Court’s vulnerability had a precedent in Juan Domingo Perón’s presidency. After Perón’s election, supporters in the Chamber of Deputies proposed impeaching four of the five justices. The charges included the Court’s acceptance of the legality of military regimes in 1930 and 1943, although Perón himself had played a key role in the 1943 coup. They also targeted the Court’s ruling that Perón’s new national labor relations board was unconstitutional. Three judges were impeached, a fourth had resigned, and the Senate approved the proceedings; Perón then appointed four replacements. The new justices validated the conviction of opposition leader Ricardo Balbín for disrespecting Perón, helping free the president from meaningful political constraint.

That episode established a precedent rather than an isolated intervention. After Perón’s regime fell in a 1955 coup, successive military and civilian governments selected their own justices. When Menem took office after a democratic transition, however, the political setting had changed: the 1983 democratic transition had installed a Court appointed by Radical Party president Raúl Alfonsín. There was no comparable break in government to explain why the incoming president should replace that Court with one of his choosing.

Menem’s campaign to reshape the Court

Menem had signaled his intentions even before taking office. He repeatedly tried, without success, to encourage or intimidate sitting justices into resigning. He offered Justice Carlos Fayt an ambassadorship. Fayt rebuked the offer by sending Menem a copy of his book, Law and Ethics, inscribed with the note, “Beware I wrote this”. The exchange made visible a conflict over whether judicial office would remain independent of presidential pressure.

Within three months of taking office, Menem sent a bill to the Chamber of Deputies to expand the Court from five members to nine. The public justification—that the Court was overworked—echoed an argument used by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937. The proposal passed quickly through both the Chamber and the Senate. With four new appointments available, Menem secured a majority on the Court.

Consequences: a precedent becomes a norm

The expansion succeeded in giving Menem control of the Court and helped normalize presidential selection of Supreme Court justices in Argentina. A judicial institution that might have constrained the executive was weakened not by one intervention alone, but by a recurring expectation that each incoming president could refashion it. The account contrasts this pattern with the United States, where a Supreme Court’s authority depends on broad support for its independence and on political actors resisting attempts to undermine it.

Menem’s broader effort to entrench his authority continued beyond the Court. He moved to rewrite the constitution to remove the presidential term limit and run again. After his reelection, he sought another constitutional rewrite, but factions within his own Perónist Party opposed his personal dominance and stopped him. The episode shows that resistance existed, but the restraint came from an internal party conflict rather than a durable institutional check on executive power.

Significance in Argentina’s political cycle

The Court expansion forms part of a wider pattern of concentrated power and limited pluralism in Argentina. During civilian rule, the Perónist Party relied on a political machine that bought votes, distributed patronage, and exchanged government contracts and jobs for political support. When military repression weakened the labor movement that Perón had cultivated as a base, the party shifted toward buying votes from other groups. In this setting, political institutions often served supporters and powerful factions rather than establishing equal constraints on government.

The book’s comparison with England clarifies what was at stake. After the Glorious Revolution, Parliament’s control of state policy helped protect property rights and made political power more pluralistic, although voting remained sharply restricted. The principle of rule of law meant that even powerful actors could face constraints and that ordinary people could claim a fair trial. Argentina’s repeated court-packing points in the opposite direction: formal democratic transitions did not, by themselves, make the judiciary secure from executive pressure. The 1990 expansion was therefore both a particular act of presidential power and a recurrence in a vicious institutional cycle, in which judicial independence failed to gain a durable foothold.