A nation cannot be brought into disarray by supreme judges.

Rui Barbosa said that the worst of all dictatorships is that of the Judiciary, because there is no one to appeal to. In Brazil in 2018, devastated by the coup d'état, large sectors of the Judiciary wear, beneath their robes, the shirts of conservative and coup-plotting right-wing parties. Some, it is possible to predict, if they lived in other times, or in other countries, would wear without embarrassment the black shirts of Mussolini, the brown shirts of Hitler, or the green shirts of Plínio Salgado.

Among those who manage to escape the brainwashing of the mafia-like and monopolistic media, the political role of first-instance judge Sérgio Moro in the Globo-Lava Jato-market machine that truly governs the country is increasingly recognized. So much so that recent polls indicate greater disapproval than approval of his methods, objectives, and practices. The prosecutors of the Holy Inquisition of Curitiba, the judges of the TRF-4, and Judge Marcelo Bretas are also experiencing a downward spiral in the eyes of society.

However, after Minister Fachin's procedural maneuver, which, to prevent Lula's release, referred the request to suspend his imprisonment to the full Supreme Court, nothing can be the same again. The law applies to everyone, except Lula. Everyone can have their cases reviewed by the Supreme Court's second panel, except Lula. The Brazilian people have the right to know what is behind Fachin's scandalous trickery, which has earned condemnation even from segments of the population that harbor no sympathy for the former president.

The challenge for Democrats now is how to confront, and rebel against, the repeated violations of the Constitution by the very people who have the legal and republican obligation to uphold it.

While it is crystal clear that there is no sign on the horizon of a revolutionary situation in the short, medium, or long term, which immediately rules out solutions outside the legal framework, the occasional, albeit forceful, protests by parliamentarians, jurists, and political and social activists against the rulings and decisions of their excellencies, marked by the purest political opportunism, are also insufficient.

A nation that allows judges of higher courts to act in this way does not even deserve to be recognized as a nation. In defense of Brazil and the shred of democracy that remains, it is necessary to subject to public condemnation, through all possible spaces and instruments – parliament, progressive parties, social movements, unions, counter-hegemonic media, etc. – ministers who betray their republican duties and render meaningless the fundamental guarantees enshrined in the Constitution.

Judges of the ilk of Carmen Lúcia, Barroso, Fachin, and Fux need to understand once and for all that they are not above the law, that by persecuting certain politicians and parties and protecting others, they are tarnishing what should be the highest court in the country, and that, since they refuse to give up their political and partisan activism, they should leave the Supreme Court, join one of the 32 existing political parties in the country, and run for elections.