Court curbing: conceptual map and impeachment requests of Brazilian Supreme Court justices
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7984.2022.e93865Keywords:
Court curbing, Impeachment, Justices, Supreme Court, BrazilAbstract
The article has two interrelated objectives. The first is to review, classify and adapt to the Brazilian context the concept of court curbing, widely used in comparative literature to examine initiatives by members of the executive and legislative branches who seek to limit the effects of a court's actions, of its members, or of its decisions. To this end, a typology of these initiatives is formulated according to the type of target (decision, magistrate, court) and the intensity of the measure (low, medium, high) that apprehends the variety of phenomena captured by the concept. The second objective is to carry out an application of the concept and typology to the specific examination of a measure of court curbing in Brazil: requests for impeachment of Supreme Court justices. Based on descriptive statistics, we demonstrate that the increase in the number of these requests, observed from 2015 onwards, can only be effectively understood as court curbing from 2019 onwards, when congressmen and, subsequently, the President of the Republic himself began to adopt these initiatives in their interaction with the court. At the same time, we demonstrate that the growth of these initiatives is especially associated with the rise of right-wing parties in the ideological spectrum and that they arise especially in the context of inquiries reported by justice Alexandre de Moraes. Finally, we demonstrate how the gradual increase in the number of requests gave greater discretion to the President of the Federal Senate in his decision-making regarding the processing of these cases.
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