He who receives his authority from the law is the first to bear its weight. The immense power that Andrés Manuel López Obrador enjoys does not derive from his morning occurrences or from the popularity that the videos in which he eats garnachas can give him; he comes directly from the Constitution and the laws. On the day of his inauguration, a rather inept, ignorant and long-tongued citizen became, by constitutional mandate, the President of the Republic, Head of State and of the Federal Government, as well as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. armed. His power was not inherited or the product of a divine destiny that led him to embody the country or the people, as his choirmasters in Congress and state governments, with masterful abjection, wanted us to believe. It is nothing more (but nothing less) than the set of powers that the law grants, temporarily, to the citizen who occupies the position of head of the executive power for six years, one of the three powers that constitute the government of Mexico.
I know that what was said in the previous paragraph is obvious, but it is worth remembering it in the middle of a six-year term in which public policies depend on the digestive system of the man whom the Constitution empowered to enforce the law and forced to be the first to abide by it and submit to it. It is clear that citizen López Obrador knows no limits other than his personal phobias, hobbies and whims, but it is also true that the President of the Republic must limit his actions to what is prescribed by law. This dichotomy between the capricious will of man and the legal powers of the president will give much to talk about in the years to come and, above all, will lead to various sanctions for those of his subordinates who fulfilled the will of man before complying with the mandate of the law.
And it is that as capricious as López Obrador may be, it will be very difficult to attribute direct responsibility to him for events or acts personally orchestrated by his subordinates. In the civil public service there is no obligation to obey the orders of a hierarchical superior when they violate the law, so all the achichincles who fulfill López Obrador’s fantasies will be solely responsible for his actions.
I bring this up as a result of reading Sergio Sarmiento’s article yesterday in Reforma, in which he gives precise information on the legal violations that officials of the Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE) have incurred in forcing the disconnection of plants 3 and 4 from Iberdrola’s Dulces Nombres plant in Nuevo León. There is no law that allows them to do this and, moreover, they did it in clear contempt of various court decisions. No, gentlemen of the CRE, the manias of the president and his aversion for Spain do not serve to found and motivate an act of authority. The ideological and psychological complexes of the Secretary of Energy, Rocío Nahle, are not part of the regulatory framework of the sector. Nor does the brief reference of the T-MEC in which Mexico’s sovereignty is recognized to legislate on energy matters allow them to violate the rest of the treaty and expropriate without compensation. His tremendous ignorance is costing us dearly and the costs will surely increase as his illicit behavior continues. We Mexicans will have to pay for your broken dishes but you will hardly go unpunished.
In other matters, the repeated breach by President López Obrador of his constitutional obligation to propose to the Senate of the Republic candidates to fill the vacancies of commissioners in the Federal Commission of Economic Competition and in the Federal Institute of Telecommunications has placed these bodies in a situation that will hardly allow them to fulfill their constitutional obligations. In this case, the direct responsibility lies with the president, but there is no sanction for his non-compliance. Given their institutional weakness, the current commissioners will have to be extremely neat in their actions. To all of them, my solidarity and best wishes.
@gsoriag
President of IDET
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Lawyer specialized in regulated sectors. President of the Telecommunications Law Institute (IDET). Doctorate in modern letters at the UIA.