The Court Above the Law​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Court Above the Law​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

By Hotspotnews

A conservative reading of this STF crisis is not that two justices simply dislike each other. It is that Brazil’s highest court has become a political battlefield in which power, procedure and evidence are all treated as weapons—and the public is expected to accept it as “institutional maturity.”

Start with the obvious double standard. For years a large part of the Court treated one minister as untouchable: a kind of super-judge who could concentrate inquiries, impose speech restrictions, and act as investigator, accuser and referee in the same breath. The moment another minister—appointed by a different political camp—used the Court’s own tools to put that figure under the same light, the reaction was not “the law applies to everyone.” It was panic, procedural improvisation, and a scramble to contain the damage. That is not equality before the law. That is caste.

The Vorcaro material is the test. A sitting justice appearing in messages from a banker under investigation—messages that, according to the police work now circulating inside the Court, include requests for help against investigations, talk of leaving the country, and links to a large contract involving a family law firm—is not a “narrative.” It is a fact pattern that would destroy an ordinary official.

Conservatives do not need to declare guilt in advance. They do need to insist that the same standard used against governors, deputies, businessmen and journalists be used here. If the answer is that a Supreme Court minister cannot even be investigated without the Court first inventing a special ritual to protect itself, then the Court has announced that it sits above the Republic.

Mendonça’s conduct can and should be scrutinized. A rapporteur who appears to apply different rigor depending on the political color of the target is a problem. Intelligence reports alleging selective criteria, interference in police work, or a sealed copy of evidence kept in a minister’s office while colleagues are denied the raw file are serious. A conservative does not defend that. A conservative says: investigate both sides with the same rules, the same chain of custody, and the same public sunlight. What is unacceptable is the instinct to treat one set of allegations as an existential threat to democracy and the other as an inconvenient dossier to be managed.

Fachin’s centralization looks, on the surface, like adult supervision. In practice it is the Court closing ranks. Taking cases away from the rapporteur, freezing related inquiries, routing any probe of a justice through the Presidency, splitting the two controversies onto different dates—this is crisis management, not transparency. It also reveals how brittle the institution has become. When monocratic orders collide in twenty-four hours—remove the Federal Police director, put him back, suspend both—the problem is not only personality. It is a Court that long ago replaced collegial judgment with personal power and is now shocked when that power is used against its own.

The timing is not accidental. Weeks before a national election, the country’s constitutional court is consumed by whether one of its members can be examined at all. That is a gift to every cynic who already believes the judiciary is a faction. Conservatives who spent years warning that an unbound Court would eventually devour its own legitimacy were not being melodramatic. They were describing a foreseeable outcome: when judges become political actors, they lose the authority to lecture everyone else about institutions.

A serious conservative position is therefore simple and unfashionable. No minister is a caste. Evidence is not “tumult” because it is inconvenient. Police reports should not be laundered through political filters. The Federal Police is not a palace guard for any wing of the Court. And a democracy that cannot look a Supreme Court justice in the eye without inventing a special procedure has already answered the question of who rules whom.

The Court can still recover a measure of dignity—but only if tomorrow’s session is about facts and jurisdiction, not about protecting a brand. If it becomes another exercise in shielding one of their own while the rest of the country is told to trust the process, the damage will not stay inside the marble. It will confirm what many Brazilians already see as a fact: that the last word in Brazilian public life is no longer the law, but which faction holds the robe.