It is not normal for a minister to make a homophobic joke with a state governor, nor to call the Minas Gerais accent a “dialect close to Portuguese”, “a language from East Timor”. Or call the former Attorney General of the Republic “drunk” and “unaccountable”, or decide based on the phrase “Assembly parliamentarians received allowance from gambling”. Not even a minister, whose lawyer son works in higher courts, could say “Brasília is getting difficult”,
It is not normal to get rich through a relative-lawyer specialized in smoothing out procedural moves, not in formulating legal arguments, whether to speed up or delay the case. And associate with your father, husband or minister brother to generate income in the family, the kinship for profit in Justice.
It is not normal for a judge to fly on a lawyer’s, businessman’s or “friend’s” jet. And call it a “ride”. And the lawyer removes his name from the client’s power of attorney and adds the name of a partner lawyer when the case reaches the hitchhiking minister’s court. Suspicion does not disappear due to a poorly disguised adjustment in the power of attorney.
It is not normal to invest in obtaining exclusive access to magistrates and call it due legal process, to abuse chicanery and call it broad defense, to practice lobbying and call it the prerogative of the legal profession. Frauding the justice system’s impartiality rules is not normal. Neither by the magistrate nor by the lawyer.
It is not normal to be a silent partner with relatives in a master-financed venture, nor to attend, or be sponsored by, those who finance. And still make decisions that interest the financier, despite master-suspicion.
It’s not normal to ignore so much evidence.
It is not normal to disguise remuneration as tax-exempt, and thus violate the constitutional limit. New trials of institutional imagination of fraud are underway. It is not normal for the STF to create a ceiling.
It is not normal, under the Rule of Law, for a public lawyer to be paid not only by salary, but by succumbing fees. And also request authorization for private law in your free time. And seek budgetary autonomy.
It is not normal for the STF to waive jurisdiction and open a conciliation table between the violator and the violated. Instead of stating the law, it becomes a forced agreement.
It is not normal to be a magistrate and work in commerce for an educational, agricultural or real estate company. Nowhere is it normal for a minister to give speeches at banks or lobby events, in his court.
This exemplary inventory of normalized behaviors highlights the normative force of the normal, the repeated and the routinized. It imposes the “normal, therefore legal” syllogism, analytical contraband with serious legal effects.
The transmutation of the normal into the legal is one of the most insidious operations of public corruption. If illegal normality supplants legality, we have atrophied normative judgment and institutions have shielded themselves from this judgment for their own benefit. Mixture of akrasia with anomie, weakness of will with toothless rule.
The rule of normality may not be the rule of law. When normality prevails over legality, the regime becomes that of the strongest.
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