Zach Beecham

And he was explaining that if Congress gives up power,

over uh lawmaking and over budgeting to the president then they lose the ability to give themselves some of these pragmatic concrete goods that they need to get reelected that the whole system really runs on how do you get the votes in congress you give them money uh so they can take it their cities to build whatever to buy ambulances and uh

It's not just that these guys in Congress are doing, you know, pork barrel stuff that might be inefficient, but, you know, is still within the bounds of legal policy.

Some of them are just straight up corrupt.

We know from all the corruption scandals of the 2010s that there is this real culture of corruption in the Brazilian elite, and there's a lot that goes on that we don't know about, and pretty credible allegations about it being concentrated to a significant degree among the dominant center-right bloc in Congress.

And so these people have an extra incentive to protect legislative power because it's not just you want to keep getting reelected.

It's that you want to keep using your position to make yourself rich.

Right.

And if you lose authority over policymaking, you have fewer levers to pull to grant favors to people that might be exchanged for some private benefits.

And ironically, the failure to get rid of corruption might end up being one of the reasons why its legislature in particular was so resilient to a would-be dictator.

No.

No to corruption.

Qualified yes to pork barrel politics.

Corruption's bad.

The lesson of Brazil is not that you should just have corruption.

It's that it is very good when there are incentives for legislators to behave independently from the president, right?

When they have motivations to protect their own prerogatives from a president who might try to take them.

Now, it is a problem in Brazil that that's bound up with a kind of

corrupt style of politics.

Ideally, those two things would be disentangled.