Comment by treflop
1 year ago
I don’t know if a well-designed democratic government needs to act undemocratically ever.
For example, in the US, the Supreme Court is able to expand its powers, but it can always be overridden by the legislative branch by design. The executive branch doesn’t even have to follow the Supreme Court’s rulings. And the legislative and executive can be replaced by citizens.
By design, the US Constitution basically has an infinite loop of checks and balances - there is always another institution that can override one institution without breaking any rules.
That said, the buck does stop, but it stops at the people. The problem is that people do need to be well-informed and vigilant to for the this scheme to work out, but to be honest, that is not a problem specifically with democracy — it’s just a general societal problem.
There have been recent Supreme Court rulings that many would say are disagreeable, but we’re not doing anything about it because a lot of citizens either support it or just don’t care. But if citizens did, we could easily undo those decisions using the rules set out by the Constitution. So the problem really lies more with the people than the system.
Now I’m not familiar with the Brazilian political system — who checks the Supreme Court there? I just know the US Constitution had a LOT of people working on it and they covered a lot of bases.
> I just know the US Constitution had a LOT of people working on it and they covered a lot of bases.
A lot of this is more fragile than you want it to be though.
For example, the US Constitution was set out to have a weak federal government and have the state governments handle all the things that didn't specifically need to be federal, and one of the biggest checks and balances for this was that federal legislation had to pass the Senate and federal Senators were elected by the state legislatures. The Senate was the states' representation in the federal government, that's what it was for. Then the 17th amendment took it away, which was immediately followed by a persistent massive expansion of federal power, because the thing that was meant to act as a check on it got deleted.
Sometimes the checks and balances need more checks and balances.
- who checks the Supreme Court there?
In theory, the Senate can check the Supreme Court by impeaching the judges, the problem is that the Supreme Court checks all the senators and congressmen, by being the only one who can prosecute them.
9 out of 11 Supreme Court judges were indicated by the Labor Party (Lula and Dilma) in the last 20 years, some closely related to Lula. They can do anything they want, without worrying about elections. The president of Brazil doesn't matter anymore, at least for the next couple of presidential elections.
To add more
* if a senator commits a crime it can rest assured that the process will moth in a drawer until prescription as long as the senator doesn't go against the supreme court or its ministers personal interests.
* the supreme court (STF) also controls the electoral tribunal (TSE).