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.
> When he (the president) uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.
this is a quote from the dissenting opinion of Judge Sotomayor.
the rest did not find that interpretation of the case true in their opinions.
A. This is the dissent from Sotomayor, panned by pretty much every major legal figure. It is not a ruling, it is not binding, and it is not necessarily accurate. Just like, I don't know, listen to a Supreme Court podcast if you're not going to read the ruling [1].
B. That has nothing to do with the power of the Supreme Court relative to Brazil's. Our Supreme Court doesn't arrest people or order the military around.
And Sotomayor correctly pointed out that it's trivially easy to assert that any given action was an official duty, thereby gaining the benefit of presumptive immunity pending a court's detailed determination.
They pretty much decide about anything they want to decide, it's that simple. It's not like "oh, we only judge constitutional matters", as it happens in serious countries. I really mean ANYTHING.
There is run of the mill lawsuits involving defamation that the court decided to judge out of the bat. The accuser is a mainstream journalist (mainstream media as a whole have been – essentially – acting as public relations of the court – similar to how they acted as public relations for Biden during the 2020 elections btw), the accused part being another brazilian journalist living abroad, called Allan dos Santos (Moraes personally hates the guy and failed to extradite him from the US countless times - USA authorities essentially answering "it's only words, this is covered by our first amendment").
And instead of this lawsuit following the normal procedure as any other defamation lawsuit in Brazil. Moraes decided to elevate this case to automatically judge it in the highest instance of the country. His excuse? “Oh, Dos Santos is investigated in other procedures here, so I think they are related". And this has been essentially their trick to investigate/trial anything they want.
They say it's related. Hell, the Brazilian Supreme Court decide to investigate Ellon Musk himself.
