Brazil’s Supreme Court Has Become a Durable Political Power Center

Felipe Jafet frames Brazil’s institutional crisis as a constitutional conflict between branches: Congress must reassert itself against a Supreme Court that he says has become a center of political authority, exercising legislative, investigative, executive, and judicial power.

Jafet does not describe a court that is merely influential or active in politically charged disputes. He says it has “boundless legal jurisdiction” alongside powers ordinarily divided among separate institutions—“judge, jury, and executioner, all wrapped into one.”

He rejects two explanations for this expansion: that it is a temporary response to a greater danger from the far right, or that it simply fills a vacuum left by Congress. In his account, neither explanation captures the problem because the Court’s powers are durable. They are “here to stay,” he says, unless another institution imposes limits.

Jafet places this argument in Brazil’s longer tradition of patrimonialism. He says the justices have fashioned themselves into the country’s “new patrons”: officials who wield the state for personal ends rather than through impersonal and bounded institutions. The issue, as he presents it, is not only that judicial authority has expanded, but that the Court has become difficult for the other branches to check.

Felipe Jafet distinguishes between the Court’s broad institutional reach and the way its members exercise it. The Court, he says, is individualistic because the vast majority of its rulings are issued unilaterally by justices rather than collectively. Its justices also hold decades-long mandates, making their authority unusually durable.

Jafet’s concern is that concentrated powers are not only housed in one institution but can be deployed by individual officeholders. That combination, he argues, makes judicial authority more personal and less subject to the constraints of collective decision-making.

He also alleges that the Court has used its authority to censor. His examples include suspending major news outlets, prosecuting people for tweets, and de-platforming Elon Musk’s X from Brazilian territory. Jafet presents those actions as evidence that the Court’s power reaches into public expression and communications, not simply legal adjudication.

His strongest charge is arbitrariness: that the law is selectively applied according to political alignment.

For Jafet, this is the defining feature of patrimonialist power. Broad jurisdiction creates the capacity to intervene across political life; unilateral decisions give individual justices a direct instrument for doing so; and long tenures allow those arrangements to persist. His claim is that censorship and selective treatment reveal how that authority can be directed toward allies and adversaries.

Felipe Jafet invokes James Madison’s maxim that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” A Court with the force and will he describes, he argues, cannot be expected to provide its own effective limits. Brazil must “reignite” institutional checks, beginning with Congress.

His proposed constitutional amendments map directly onto the defects he identifies. Abolishing individual rulings would address the unilateral exercise of judicial authority. Limiting the Court’s original jurisdiction in cases against members of Congress would narrow what Jafet sees as the Court’s direct leverage over the legislative branch. Term limits for justices would address the durability of decades-long mandates.

The proposals are not presented as procedural adjustments. They are intended to redistribute authority among Brazil’s institutions and make the same concentration of judicial power harder to preserve. Jafet also says Brazil must confront the symptoms of patrimonialism directly, although his specific reforms focus on judicial decision-making, jurisdiction, and tenure.

The immediate political test, in his view, is the impeachment of Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Jafet identifies Moraes as the central figure in the patronage system he alleges and calls on Congress to remove him. He presents impeachment as a precedent-setting act: a signal that separation and balance of powers cannot be disregarded without consequence.

The remedy, then, is not judicial self-restraint. It is legislative action: constitutional limits on unilateral rulings and judicial reach, shorter judicial tenure, and Congress’s use of its power to hold a justice accountable.