Comment by mike_hearn
2 hours ago
The Brazilian Supreme Court is completely out of control and its judgements mean nothing. It's not like the American Supreme Court that only arbitrates constitutional matters. Look at the recent history of it and you'll find judges on it using the police as their personal enforcers, randomly imprisoning people who criticize them, high levels of outright corruption and Lula's personal lawyer being appointed to it. Think about it: would the US Supreme Court personally convict someone of a crime? No, they only hear appeals, there is no such thing as someone directly imprisoned by a single supreme court judge in America. The Brazilian court also interferes directly in elections - in this case one of them ordered that voting be extended for hours after it had already been closed and the ballot boxes sealed for no good reason.
Basically, in Brazil the Supreme Court appears to be directly in charge of the police, and they can and do issue whatever "rulings" they want to impose their will on whatever or whoever they feel like, with no appeals possible. Including elected politicians.
I expect this HN thread to be a disaster zone of badly informed takes, but the Brazilians I know consider Brazil to be a dictatorship and this election to have been stolen. It's a sad day.
Thank you so much for this post. I've been saying the same thing as you, and people in this thread are already telling me to check myself into a mental institution.
Bolsonaro was the last chance we had to fix this. The plan was to impeach those judges and then restrict the court to purely constitutional matters, like the US supreme court. That little project is pretty much done now. We'll be lucky if we can impeach Alexandre de Moraes. It's over.
In Brazil, judges are gods. An actual lawyer told me this, once.