If the nomination and approval for the open position at the (Supreme Federal Court) are carried out, he would be the fourth head of the (Advocacy General of the Union) to be promoted to a seat on the highest court in the country.
Before him, the ministers , and , respectively appointed by (), () and (), left the government’s legal defense heading to the Supreme Court.
Furthermore, a survey carried out by Sheet shows that Messias, if appointed, would be the 12th to have held a role in the federal Executive before being chosen for the post. Among the 31 ministers who joined the court during the redemocratization period, 11 are included in this classification.
Of the presidents responsible for these choices, he leads, with three of the nominations. FHC and Lula each made two appointments. While the rest is completed by Fernando Collor, Itamar Franco, Michel Temer and Bolsonaro, each of them with a nomination. He is just not among those who appointed members of the federal government to the court.
As shown by Sheetupon inheriting functions performed by , being consulted by Lula regarding legal disputes.
In addition to the post of AGU, another position that is repeated in part of these appointments is that of head of the Justice department, the most recent example being also the last appointment made by President Lula, when he appointed Dino to the Supreme Court at the end of 2023.
Dino was the sixth Supreme Court minister in the period to have also held the post of Minister of Justice. Another member of this list is the minister, appointed by Michel Temer (), at the beginning of 2017, after less than a year in office.
Before Moraes, the list of government members who reached the Supreme Court continues with the aforementioned Dias Toffoli, in 2009, and Gilmar Mendes, in 2002.
Before appointing the first woman to the Supreme Court, Minister Ellen Gracie, in 2000, FHC appointed Nelson Jobim, in 1997, who at the time of his appointment headed the Justice department in his government.
Unlike Dino, Moraes and Jobim, not all of them were elevated directly from Justice to the Supreme Court. Maurício Corrêa, for example, was appointed by Itamar Franco in 1994, a few months after leaving his position as Minister of Justice.
in turn, appointed in 1989 by José Sarney, held the position of Minister of Justice in the government until the previous month. While Mendonça, who completes the list, was appointed by Bolsonaro when he was head of the AGU.
Completing the list of eleven ministers who served in the Executive are former minister Francisco Rezek, the only one to have two stints in the STF, Celso de Mello and Célio Borja.
Rezek, who had joined the court in the early 1980s, left the court to assume the Foreign Affairs portfolio under Collor and, in 1992, was appointed again to the court by the then president.
Already, who spent 31 years in the chair, held the positions of general consultant of the Republic, legal advisor to the civil office of the Presidency and general secretary of the Republic’s consultancy during the government of José Sarney.
Finally, , appointed by Sarney in 1986, served as chief advisor of the Special Advisory to the President of the Republic before joining the court.
Apart from the nomination for Barroso’s vacancy, of the last five nominations, three were from people who held positions in the government: Dino, Mendonça, and Moraes. The other two most recent, from Cristiano Zanin and , even though they were from actors outside the Executive, are names in which the trust factor would have weighed heavily.
Zanin was Lula’s personal lawyer, having worked in the processes that led to the annulment of his criminal convictions, while Bolsonaro even said, that his nominee had to be someone who would have “a beer” or “a tubaína” with him.
“What do I convey if I’m having a tubaína with you? What does it mean? That we are friends”, he said in an interview at the time.
Before Temer’s appointment of Moraes in 2017, there was a sequence of 13 nominations by Lula (8 ministers) and Dilma (5 ministers). Of them, only Toffoli meets the criteria for members of the Executive. Despite being just a name, he is on track to be one of the longest-serving, as he was nominated in 2009 and could remain at court until 2042, if he does not retire early like Barroso.
FHC, in turn, made three nominations, two of which were from members of his government: Gilmar and Jobim.
Sarney meets this criterion with three of his five nominations, Itamar with his only nomination and Collor, with one name among four nominees.
Professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina Luciano Da Ros, whose research topics include the careers of members of the Judiciary, points out that the key words to understand are proximity and trust.
“These are people the president trusts, because he has lived with them for a long time, he is close to them. So he believes, not that he can control them, but that they have interests close to his and reasonably predictable,” he says.
Da Ros adds that a government that would have deviated from this pattern, by not appointing members of the presidential inner circle of trust, would be Dilma’s. “It was a silently anti-corruption government before Lava Jato, in a way,” he argues.
Samuel Vida, professor of law at UFBA (Federal University of Bahia) and doctor in law, State and Constitution from UnB (University of Brasília), assesses that Lula’s possible appointment of Messias seems to privilege both the issue of loyalty and an electoral interest, by sending a signal to the evangelical electorate.
For him, this is a mistake, because, on the one hand, it may be useful to the interests of a government that will soon pass, on the other, it may be contributing to prolonging the crisis. “President Lula could inaugurate a resumption of the original purposes of our constitutional construction and think strategically and leave this legacy of reinforcing pluralism”, he argues.
Today the court has . Never in the history of the court has there been a black minister.
