A week on from Morena’s landslide victory in Mexico’s largest-ever election, Claudia Sheinbaum’s still shaking up markets.

I don’t want to make a habit of documenting Sheinbaum’s every utterance, but I’d be remiss not to note that the peso’s on track for its worst month since the onset of the pandemic.

So far, the currency’s more than 8% weaker in June.

That’s entirely attributable to market concerns around Sheinbaum and specifically the prospect that she’ll leverage a super-majority in Mexico’s lower house and a near super-majority in the upper chamber (where she can probably wheel and deal her way to securing the votes) to push through a series of “reforms” championed by AMLO.

Note the scare quotes around the word “reforms.” These are constitutional changes that some critics worry are tantamount to democratic backsliding.

This week, following a meeting with AMLO, Sheinbaum indicated she’ll press ahead with a judicial overhaul that’d entail the direct election of judges, including Supreme Court justices, who’d be chosen by the people rather than appointed.

It might seem counterintuitive to describe popularly-elected judges — or popularly-elected anything for that matter — as anti-democratic, but that’s the paradox of democracies: Majorities can be tyrannical.

The trick is to create a system that includes just enough counter-majoritarian checks to guard against that tyranny, without opening the door the minority rule, a perversion of democracy. In case you haven’t noticed, evidence is mounting that the US has too many counter-majoritarian checks.

AMLO contends the current system leaves the judiciary beholden to a minority and, like everything else in Mexico, vulnerable to cartel capture. Critics say his reform idea would erode judicial independence, particularly to the extent the changes include shorter terms, the tethering of judicial salaries to executive branch pay and the establishment of a directly-elected judicial disciplinary council.

In May, The Mexican Bar Association, the Stanford Law School Rule of Law Impact Lab and the Inter-American Dialogue’s Rule of Law Program, issued a joint report on the reform proposals. It wasn’t flattering. “The analysis concludes that the proposals directed at the federal judiciary constitute a direct threat to judicial independence, violate international legal standards and undermine democracy in Mexico,” the groups said.

During a press conference this week, Sheinbaum said Mexico should have a “wide discussion” in the months ahead (i.e., before she takes office and prior to the new congressional term) about the judiciary, and that the dialogue should include “bar associations, law schools and judges.”

She also said the reforms probably wouldn’t affect the currency, but as Reuters dryly noted, “the peso weakened by nearly 2% as Sheinbaum was speaking.”

Meanwhile, Esmeralda Garzon, a local councilwoman in the Tixtla municipality, was gunned down outside her home late last week, becoming the second female politician to be murdered in Mexico since Sheinbaum’s election.