12/01/2006 03:08:22 PM EST
Mexico's Calderon sneaks into office, is jeered
posted by Tergenev
In the past few days, the conservative candidate for Mexico's presidency has preemptively declared himself president of this supposed democracy. Filipe Calderon, in a strange and rushed private ceremony last night at the Presidential residence has seemingly taken over the Mexican government. The ceremony, performed with departing Mexican President Vincente Fox in attendance, is not the way that presidential authority is normally transferred in the country. The move is of questionable legality.
As reported by ABC News, authorities on the Mexican constitution are quite confused and disturbed by this move by Calderon:
.. experts on Mexico's constitution puzzled over whether Mexico had a president or not Friday morning. Presidents must be sworn in "before congress" ...
Why is that conservatives feel the need to seize power, even when there is clearly no mandate for them to do so, and when they need to resort to shady dealings and backroom ceremonies just to take over the strings of government? Perhaps it has something to do with the debts they owe to their corporate backers. If they fail to gain power due to an inconveniently close election, they will have no access to the huge flows of government money they need in order to pay off their own. . . er, i mean their backers.
It's good to see that members of the political ranks of a representative democracy are showing enough backbone in Mexico to actually physically stand for the rule of law and the legitimacy of an actual elected executive branch. As one supporter of Mr. Lopez Obrador, the opposition candidate, put it,
"It is going to be very rough for Calderon. Wherever he goes, we'll be there to remind him he became president through fraud."
Too bad our own Congresspersons and Senators don't have such devotion to our own Constitution.
The signing statement that King George put on the Patriot Act reauthorization act this past year should be enough for the members of the U.S. Congress to rise up in protest against him. He negotiated with the representatives of the people in Congress, granting some oversight of his government's use of the Patriot Act to Congress while trying to get Patriot Act renewal through Congress, and then in an illegal signing statement, he called those oversight laws 'unconstitutional' and declared that he would not allow them. That alone should have Congressmen screaming in the aisles of the House and Senators pounding at the gates of the White House. The fact that they are not is not civility, it is going along to get along, with a tyrant and his entire imperialist cabal.
