Law, Power, and Justice

THURSDAY 2 OCTOBER 2025

NEWS NOTES FROM THE CHILDLESS CAT LADY WORKING AWAY IN ONE OF THE SUB-BASEMENTS OF THE MINISTRY OF SNARK

Well, here it is morning again.  The cats have been fed and gone for their morning walk.  Sam (the new kitten) has learned how to go from chair to chair and get up on the main kitchen cabinet.  He’s a smart one, is he.  Jake da Mouth has already had his morning dose of antibiotic.  He’s FIV positive and this wretching virus that the cats were passing from one to the other hit him harder than the rest of the guys.  He also got an anti-inflammatory shot which always makes him feel so much better.  I can tell when he doesn’t feel well just by looking at his face. 

TRUMP

• The Republicans (scum that they are) are not even in Washinton.  Trump is meeting with OMB to see which Democratic initiative to cut out of the budget since the government is in shutdown. 
• There’s new audio of people on the subway calling 911 after this poor, poor Ukrainian woman was stabbed to death on the train.  What a statement about a country.  A young woman leaves her country because it is in a war and gets stabbed to death on a subway train for no reason at all.  What a country.
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• Over on AmVO, Steve Bannon’s Channel, they are talking about redistricting.  Redistricting, according to them, is the essential key to winning the mid-terms.  “The Democrats are like the modern slave traders.”  This is because the federal government counts illegal aliens in the census count, according to them.  “radical neo-Marxist party” this is what Steve Bannon calls the party of Jefferies.  Good grief.

• Energy Department cancels hundreds of clean-energy projects mostly in blue states (NYT)

• Obamacare prices could rise by thousands of dollars (NYT)

BRAZIL: NYT, 9/12/25)

• In September 2025, the ex-Presient Jair Bolsonaro was convicted of conspiring against democracy and attempting a coup in the wake of his 2022 election defeat.  He has been sentenced to 27 years in prison.
• Trump, who also attempted to overturn an election after a defeat, (in 2020) was not sent to prison, but back to the WhiteHouse.
• Trump, in order to support his criminal friend, placed a 50% tariff on most Brazilian exports and imposed sanctions on several government officials and Supreme Court justices.
• Using a familiar phrase, the Trump administration called Bolsonaro’s conviction a “witch hunt.”
• Bolsonaro is a far-right politician who was elected in 2018 and borrowed heavily from Mr.Trump’s way of doing things.
• He began to question the integrity of the electoral process before the election as polls showed him behind.
• He attacked Brazil’s electronic voting system.
• He lost narrowly to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, but refused to concede.  Then, on January 8, 2023 thousands of his supporters stormed the Congress, Supreme court and presidential palace. 
• Bolsonaro conspired with elements of the military to block Lula’s inauguration.  There were plans to assassinate Lula, Geraldo Alckmin and Justice Morales.  The army command, however, under pressure from the Biden administration refused to go along with the coup attempt. 

• “Americans did remarkably little to protect their democracy from the leader who had assaulted it…constitutional checks failed to hold Mr. Trump accountable….”  Although the House voted to impeach him, the Senate voted to acquit him.

• The Justice Department dragged its feet in prosecuting Trump, waiting nearly two years before even appointing a special counsel. 

• In 2024, SCOTUS ruled that presidents enjoy sweeping immunity, derailing the government’s case.”  After he won in 2024 the federal cases against him were dropped.

• Quote from Times article:

• This was an unprecedented step. The administration targeted a Supreme Court justice in a democratic country with sanctions that had previously been reserved for notorious human rights violators such as Abdulaziz al-Hawsawi, who was implicated in the 2018 murder of a Washington Post contributor, Jamal Khashoggi, and Chen Quanguo, an architect of the Chinese government’s persecution of its Uyghur minority. Following the Bolsonaro verdict on Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio doubled down on Mr. Trump’s policy (and his analogy), declaring that the United States would “respond accordingly to this witch hunt.”
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• In short, the Trump administration has sought to use tariffs and sanctions to bully Brazilians into subverting their legal system — and their democracy along with it. In effect, the U.S. administration is punishing Brazilians for doing something Americans should have done, but failed to: hold a former president accountable for attempting to overturn an election.
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• Contemporary democracies face mounting challenges from illiberal politicians and movements that win power in elections and then subvert the constitutional order. Elected leaders like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Kais Saied in Tunisia politicized government agencies and deployed them to weaken opponents and entrench themselves in power.
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• A lesson from the 1920s and 1930s — the last time Western democracies faced such threats from within — is that illiberal forces don’t always play fair in elections. They are more willing than liberals to use demagoguery, misinformation and violence to win and retain power. As European liberals learned during that period, passivity in the face of such threats can be costly. Democracies cannot defend themselves. They must be defended. Even the best-designed constitutional checks are mere pieces of paper unless leaders exercise them.
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• Over the last decade, the United States and Brazil both confronted illiberal threats. The parallels are striking. Both countries elected presidents with authoritarian instincts who, after losing re-election, went after democratic institutions.
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• Mr. Trump violated the cardinal rule of democracy when he refused to accept defeat in the 2020 election and attempted to overturn the results in a campaign that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
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• Mr. Bolsonaro, a far-right politician elected in 2018, borrowed heavily from Mr. Trump’s playbook. Behind in the polls as the 2022 election approached, Mr. Bolsonaro began to question the integrity of the electoral process. He repeatedly denounced the electoral authorities and attacked — and tried to eliminate — Brazil’s electronic voting system. He claimed the only way he could lose was through fraud, implying that an opposition victory would be illegitimate.
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• After narrowly losing to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Mr. Bolsonaro, predictably, refused to concede, and on Jan. 8, 2023, thousands of his supporters stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential palace. Although the uprising paralleled the events of Jan. 6, Mr. Bolsonaro’s attack on democracy went beyond Mr. Trump’s. Drawing on Brazil’s history of military involvement in politics, Mr. Bolsonaro, a former army captain, had cultivated an alliance with elements of the armed forces. Lacking a strong party or legislative base, he leaned on the military for support.
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• Voluminous evidence uncovered by the Federal Police indicated that Mr. Bolsonaro and some of his military allies conspired to overturn the election and block Mr. Lula’s inauguration. The conspiracy appears to have included plans to assassinate Mr. Lula, Vice President-elect Geraldo Alckmin and Justice Moraes. Fortunately, the army command, under pressure from the Biden administration, refused to go along with the coup attempt.
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• In both the United States and Brazil, then, elected presidents assaulted democratic institutions, seeking to maintain themselves in power after losing re-election. Both power grabs failed — initially.
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• But that’s where the two histories diverge. Americans did remarkably little to protect their democracy from the leader who had assaulted it. The country’s vaunted constitutional checks failed to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Although the House of Representatives voted to impeach Mr. Trump in January 2021, the Senate, which could have convicted him and barred him from running for president again, voted to acquit him. The Justice Department was slow to prosecute Mr. Trump for his role in fomenting the Jan. 6 insurrection, waiting nearly two years before appointing a special counsel. Mr. Trump was indicted in August 2023, but the Supreme Court, acting without a sense of urgency, allowed the case to be delayed. In July 2024, the court ruled that presidents enjoy sweeping immunity, derailing the government’s case against Mr. Trump. The Republican Party nominated Mr. Trump to run for re-election in 2024 despite his openly authoritarian behavior. When he won the election, the federal cases against him were dropped.
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• These institutional failures proved costly. The second Trump administration has been openly authoritarian, weaponizing government agencies and deploying them to punish critics, threaten rivals and bully the private sector, the media, law firms, universities and civil society groups. It has routinely skirted the law and at times defied the Constitution. Less than nine months into Mr. Trump’s second presidential term, the United States has arguably already crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.
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• Brazil followed a different path. Having lived under military dictatorship, Brazilian public officials perceived a threat to democracy from the beginning of Mr. Bolsonaro’s presidency. Many judges and congressional leaders saw a need to energetically defend their country’s democratic institutions. As Justice Moraes told one of us, “We realized that we could be Churchill or Chamberlain. I didn’t want to be Chamberlain.”
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• Viewing themselves as a bulwark against Mr. Bolsonaro’s authoritarianism, Brazilian justices pushed back forcefully. When evidence emerged that the Bolsonaro campaign had made widespread use of misinformation during the 2018 election, the court began what became known as the Fake News Inquiry, in which it aggressively sought to crack down on what the justices viewed as dangerous misinformation. Justice Moraes, who became president of the Superior Electoral Tribunal (which is run by the Supreme Court) in 2022, led the inquiry. Under Justice Moraes, the court suspended the social media accounts of activists it found had engaged in anti-democratic online activity, ordered the removal of some online content it deemed threatening to democracy, searched the homes of pro-Bolsonaro businessmen who were alleged to have supported a coup, and even arrested a pro-Bolsonaro congressman who had called for dictatorship and the dissolution of the court. (He was released after nine months.) These measures were controversial in Brazil, and they are certainly somewhat at odds with America’s libertarian tradition, but they were broadly consistent with how Germany and other European democracies regulate anti-democratic speech.
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• On Election Day, the Superior Electoral Tribunal took several steps to ensure the integrity of the vote, including ordering the dismantling of illegal checkpoints established by pro-Bolsonaro police and announcing the results immediately after the vote count concluded so that Mr. Bolsonaro would not have time to contest them. Crucially, in another striking departure from what happened in the United States, prominent pro-Bolsonaro politicians, including top legislative leaders and right-wing governors, promptly recognized Mr. Lula’s victory.
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• After the events of Jan. 8, 2023, made it clear that Mr. Bolsonaro posed a threat to democracy, Brazilian courts moved aggressively to hold him to account — and prevent his return to power. In June 2023, the Superior Electoral Tribunal barred Mr. Bolsonaro from holding public office for eight years, closing the door on a 2026 presidential bid. In February 2025, Mr. Bolsonaro was indicted on charges of coup conspiracy, setting in motion the trial that led to Thursday’s conviction.
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• Although Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters took to the streets to protest his prosecution, most of Brazil’s conservative politicians have largely accepted this process. Although many conservative politicians have criticized what they view as judicial overreach and some of them have endorsed proposals to impeach Supreme Court justices or provide amnesty to Mr. Bolsonaro and the imprisoned Jan. 8 rioters, the conservative-dominated Congress has conspicuously failed to pursue those measures. Indeed, most right-wing politicians appear content to see Mr. Bolsonaro sidelined in 2026. That would allow them to rally behind a more conventional standard-bearer (probably a right-wing governor) who, however conservative, would probably play by the rules of the democratic game.
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• Unlike the United States, then, Brazil’s institutions acted vigorously and, so far, effectively to hold a former president accountable for trying to overturn an election. It is precisely the effectiveness of Brazil’s institutions that has placed the country in the cross hairs of the Trump administration. Having run out of options in Brazil, Mr. Bolsonaro turned to Mr. Trump. Mr. Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo lobbied the White House for months, seeking U.S. intervention on his father’s behalf. Mr. Trump, who said Mr. Bolsonaro’s case looked “very much like” what “they tried to do with me,” was persuaded.
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• In attempting to bully Brazilian authorities into letting Mr. Bolsonaro escape justice, the Trump administration is abandoning nearly four decades of U.S. policy toward Latin America. After the end of the Cold War, U.S. administrations were fairly consistent in their defense of democracy in Latin America. The Biden administration’s efforts to block Mr. Bolsonaro’s coup attempt were a clear manifestation of that policy. Now, in a move that evokes some of America’s most anti-democratic Cold War interventions, the United States is trying to subvert one of Latin America’s most important democracies.
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• With all its flaws, Brazilian democracy is healthier today than America’s. Keenly aware of their country’s authoritarian past, Brazil’s judicial and political authorities did not take democracy for granted. Their U.S. counterparts, by contrast, fell down on the job. Rather than undermining Brazil’s effort to defend its democracy, Americans should learn from it.

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The cats are all mostly on the back porch, frolicking (Sam) and watching the frolicking (Jake, Short Change, Eddie, and Mustard).  It’s bedtime.  Sam is such a gift. Everything is new to him and everything is exciting, and nothing is dangerous.  HE’s having himself a wonderful childhood and it is a pleasure to watch him.