Politics
Brazil Supreme Court Cancels Meeting About Whether To Investigate Brazil Supreme Court
By Sean Vanity, . BSN Network. Satire.
Brazil's Supreme Court held a public hearing Tuesday to decide whether to investigate one of its own members, Justice Alexandre de Moraes, for allegedly manipulating evidence and interfering in the country's elections. They listened to the arguments, traded accusations on live television, called each other liars in formal Portuguese, and then postponed the vote with no scheduled date to try again.
The court needed to decide whether the court should look into what the court had been doing. They took a pass.
Moraes, who serves simultaneously as a Supreme Court justice and as the head of the country's Superior Electoral Court, meaning he is both a judge and the referee of the elections the judge is accused of influencing, called the proceedings politically motivated. His colleagues who support the investigation called his response politically motivated. A neutral observer would note that every single person in that room is a political appointee and has been for years, but no neutral observers were permitted to vote.
The justices who pushed for the delay argued that more time was needed to review the evidence. The evidence in question has been sitting in a Federal Police report since last year. The report is 884 pages long. A motivated adult reads roughly 250 pages a day. The court has had fourteen months. They need more time.
Former President Jair Bolsonaro, whose associates filed the original complaint that triggered the investigation into Moraes, celebrated the delay as a moral victory from his home, where he has been living under house arrest because Alexandre de Moraes put him there. That particular irony did not make it into most of the official statements.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's government has expressed full confidence in the Supreme Court's ability to handle this matter with total impartiality, which is the thing you say when you want the court to keep handling your political enemies and you would prefer the process to stay quiet.
Constitutional law professors across Brazil described the delay as creating "significant institutional uncertainty" ahead of the 2026 elections. Institutional uncertainty is the academic phrase for what happens when the people responsible for enforcing the rules are the ones under investigation for breaking them and the vote on what to do about it keeps getting rescheduled like a dentist appointment nobody actually wants to keep.
The court has not set a new hearing date. Justice Moraes remains on the bench. The elections remain scheduled. The 884-page report remains, presumably, somewhere in a building.
Brazil is the fifth largest country on earth. This is who they put in charge of it, and then asked to sort itself out.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-15/alexandre-de-moraes-says-probe-against-him-driven-by-politics