WHEN a Brazilian president picks someone to serve on the supreme court, he (or she) expects the choice to be waved through. The last time Congress rejected a nominee to the highest court was in 1894, when it turned down a former army medic and writer whose judicial experience consisted of serving on a military tribunal during the Paraguay war of 1865-70. Luiz Fachin, a former state prosecutor and expert in family law, is better qualified. But on May 12th he was subjected to a grilling by the Senate’s justice commission the likes of which no recent candidate has experienced.
The panel ended up approving him, by a vote of 20 to seven. But the Senate Speaker, Renan Calheiros, nominally a coalition ally of the president, Dilma Rousseff, has made it plain that Mr Fachin’s confirmation in a secret ballot of the full Senate on May 19th will be no mere formality.
Mr Fachin’s travails have little to do with jurisprudence and everything to do with a power struggle between an unruly Congress and an enfeebled president. The two sides have been tussling ever since the start of Ms Rousseff’s second term in January. The new battleground is the...
from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1RJZpNH
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