Comment by matheusmoreira

They do. Literal hard power. These guys have the pens which make federal police do their thing. I call them the judge-kings.

You know what's worse? Deep down, every brazilian knows it. Everyone here has always known this truth. Even before all this began. There's an old saying here: "doctors think they're gods, judges know it". Judges making arbitrary and monocratic decisions is a completely normalized thing here. We're witnessing in real time just how far their godlike powers stretch. We now know for a fact that judges have enough power to violate the brazilian constitution and get away with it.

Talking to actual brazilian lawyers is a surreal experience. Sometimes they'd sound confused while explaining a supreme court decision to me. They would say: "the supreme court was supposed to apply the constitution but they decided to legislate instead". Yeah, an actual lawyer told me that once. I was his student and I never forgot that lesson. The judges legislate in this country. If the judge-king doesn't like the law, he just doesn't apply it. If the law says the guy is innocent but the judge-king feels like punishing him, he gets punished.

"Judicial activism", they call it. Oh it's nothing, just a harmless euphemism for a silent coup that installed a dictatorship of the unelected judiciary. And even on HN my fellow brazilians will come and flag my posts to oblivion while insisting that I'm actually living in a democracy.