Perón court impeachment was the 1946–1947 removal of three Argentine Supreme Court justices by Perón’s congressional supporters, followed by his appointment of four replacements. It turned a constitutional dispute into a decisive weakening of judicial constraints and became an early precedent for presidential control of the Court in Argentina.

Constitutional Setting

Argentina’s 1853 constitution established a Supreme Court with duties comparable to those of the United States Supreme Court. In 1887, the Argentine Court acquired the power to decide whether particular laws were constitutional. That formal authority might have made it a significant check on the executive, but the wider political and economic system remained extractive, without broad social empowerment or political pluralism.

Perón had been elected president in 1946. He had first gained national prominence after the 1943 military coup, which appointed him minister of labor; in that role, he built ties with trade unions and the labor movement that became central to his presidential coalition. The Court’s authority therefore stood within a system where constitutional institutions existed, but the distribution of political power gave them limited support beyond their formal design.

The Impeachment

Soon after Perón’s election, his supporters in the Chamber of Deputies proposed impeaching four of the Court’s five members. Their accusations included the Court’s acceptance of the legality of the military regimes of 1930 and 1943—a charge made against Perón despite his own key role in the 1943 coup.

The other central dispute concerned the Court’s decisions striking down legislation. Shortly before Perón became president, it had ruled his new national labor relations board unconstitutional. As with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s criticism of the U.S. Supreme Court during his 1936 reelection campaign, Perón had attacked the Court during his own 1946 campaign. The impeachment thus followed a conflict over the boundaries of judicial review, with the Court’s ruling directly touching an institution central to Perón’s labor policy.

Nine months after the process began, the Chamber of Deputies impeached three justices; a fourth had already resigned. The Senate approved the motion. Perón then appointed four new justices, remaking the Court rather than accepting its prior decisions as a continuing constraint on his administration.

Consequences for the Court and Executive Power

The replacements freed Perón from an important political check. The newly appointed judges, for example, upheld the constitutionality of the conviction of Ricardo Balbín, leader of Perón’s principal opposition party, the Radical Party, for disrespecting Perón. The account presents the weakened Court as enabling Perón to exercise power with the latitude of a dictator.

The consequences extended beyond Perón’s presidency. After the successful court impeachment, it became normal in Argentina for each incoming president to choose Supreme Court justices. Perón’s government was removed by a coup in 1955, and the country thereafter alternated between military and civilian rule; both kinds of regime selected their own justices. Even the democratic transition from one elected government to another in 1990 did not restore a norm of judicial independence: presidents continued to treat the Court as an institution to reshape.

Institutional Significance

The episode illustrates the difference between possessing a constitutional court and sustaining one capable of constraining political power. Argentina’s Court had formal authority to review laws, but the impeachment and replacement of its judges showed how that authority could be subordinated when pluralism and broader constraints on the executive were weak.

In the book’s comparison, the episode also stands against the limits that pluralist institutions can impose on powerful leaders elsewhere. Where legal restraints depend on a wider political balance, a court cannot reliably preserve its independence through constitutional powers alone. Perón’s successful intervention became a self-reinforcing precedent: presidents who followed him inherited both the means and the expectation of remaking the judiciary to their advantage.