After opposition parties won control of the Venezuelan congress in a landslide election in December 2015, they hoped to use the legislature to check the power of autocratic president Nicolás Maduro. Thus, the new congress passed an amnesty law that would free 120 political prisoners, and it voted to block Maduro's declaration of a state of economic emergency {which granted him vast power to govern by decree}. To fend off this challenge, Maduro turned to the supreme court, which was packed with loyalists. The chavista court effectively incapacitated the legislature by ruling nearly all of its bills-including the amnesty law, efforts to revise the national budget, and the rejection of the state of emergency-unconstitutional. According to the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, the court ruled against congress twenty-four times in six months, striking down "all the laws it has approved.
( Steven Levitsky )
[ How Democracies Die ]
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