Antony Blinken condemns 'packing courts' as 'one of the ways that democracies can come undone'

by Joel Gehrke, Foreign Affairs Reporter |

 | October 20, 2021 06:09 PM 

 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned “packing courts” as a threat to democratic systems and governance, during a trip to Latin America that could put him crosswise with a left-wing campaign to enlarge the Supreme Court.

“Consider a country where a leader is elected in a free and fair election and then sets about chipping away slowly but surely at the pillars of democracy. ... Now, imagine that leader then seeks to use the levers of democracy to pass anti-democratic reforms — eliminating term limits, packing courts, firing legislators,” Blinken told an audience at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador. “That’s the story of more than one democracy in our hemisphere. And it’s one of the ways that democracies can come undone.”

Blinken condemned that panoply of power grabs just days after a commission established by President Joe Biden to study adding seats to the U.S. Supreme Court questioned “whether Court expansion would be wise.” Republican officials hailed the remark as a boon for their case against the expansion campaign, while Blinken situated his comments within a broader case to fortify the rule of law in Latin America.

“So the United States is focusing on how we can more effectively fight corruption, which President Biden has for the first time designated as a core U.S. national security interest,” Blinken said. “But because corruption is borderless, and because corrupt actors are very adept at exploiting the weakest links in our interconnected global system, no country can effectively fight corruption alone, or even just with the help of other governments. We need strong anticorruption partners everywhere — and in every field.”

Corruption has emerged as a mainstay of diplomatic discourse in recent years, often as U.S. officials caution that China uses bribes and other illicit means to grease the Belt and Road Initiative — an overseas investment initiative that Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping has used to acquire control of strategically significant infrastructure. Blinken made an oblique reference to China as he touted the United States's plans to invest in local communities “rather than miring them in a pernicious cycle of debt,” as the Belt and Road Initiative has done in key locales.

“Making these kinds of investments helps puncture the myth that authoritarian governments like to tell about themselves: that they are better at delivering for people’s basic needs,” he said. “Autocrats offer people a false choice: you can either have basic civil and political rights, or you can have a higher standard of living. But for all the promises autocrats have made about improving people’s welfare, their track record, that tells a different story.”

Yet Blinken underscored a more immediate symptom of corruption, for both the U.S. and Latin American states, when pressed by a student about whether Biden will deliver “a more [humane] immigration policy” than his predecessor.

“We do have to get a handle, as we would say, on this challenge, and that means countries taking steps to make it clear that people cannot simply move freely from south to north and they will not be able to get into the United States,” Blinken said.

"It happens because there’s something driving and pushing people to feel that their only choice is to do that,” he continued. “We have to give them another choice, and of course we have to deal with other drivers of migration — violence, conflict, corruption.”

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