Brazil’s right-wing Senate majority sets stage for Supreme Court overhaul

Filed 1h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Daderot · CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Brazil's incoming Senate majority, aligned with presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro's Liberal Party, could hold up to 49 of the 54 votes needed to impeach a Supreme Court justice after the party won 19 new seats. Bolsonaro, who faces President Lula in an Oct. 25 runoff, has proposed stripping the court of jurisdiction over criminal cases involving public officials and limiting rulings by individual justices. Senate President Davi Alcolumbre said 109 impeachment petitions against the court's members are already pending, though none has ever succeeded.

Legal scholars quoted in the piece note impeachment is meant for misconduct, not retaliation for rulings, and that reducing the court's jurisdiction could be used to shield politically connected cases from review. Proposals to limit individual rulings have already cleared one chamber by a wide margin. The next president could also appoint up to four of the court's 11 justices, reshaping its composition regardless of whether impeachment succeeds.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

When the people writing the rules are also the ones who might get prosecuted under them, you don't need a conspiracy theory, you just need to watch the vote count. A court that can be impeached whenever it rules the wrong way isn't a court anymore, it's a weather vane. The 109 pending petitions aren't really about the law, they're a message, and everybody in that chamber already got it.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Investigations · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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