Source: Yahoo News
So much for Chavismo's 'belief in democracy':
Roughly a quarter of the way into a multi-hour speech last week, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro recalled a conversation he claimed to have had nine years ago with Hugo Chávez, his deceased predecessor. In Maduro’s telling, despite his electoral success, el Comandate had long harbored a secret desire to “break definitively” with the “old bourgeoisie structures of representation” that he felt distanced the government from the people. “This is a task we have still to carry out,” Maduro announced. Five days later, his government made good on that promise.
Over the past few days, tensions between the chavista government and the new opposition-dominated National Assembly, which was inaugurated last week after December’s landslide election, reached a fever pitch. On Monday, the constitutional chamber of Venezuela’s supreme court — which in over 45,000 decisions over the last dozen years has never ruled against the presidency — suspended the assembly and declared its leadership to be “in contempt” of the court’s authority.
It’s unclear what this determination means, since there is no constitutional basis for any of this. The supreme court claims that its ruling nullifies in advance any legislation the assembly might try to pass — unless the opposition acquiesces to the suspension of three of its legislators, whom the government accuses of buying votes in the remote state of Amazonas. The stakes are high, since the loss of even a single legislator could neutralize the opposition’s two-thirds supermajority, threatening its ability to reform the constitution or initiate a recall referendum against Maduro
Read more: Yahoo News
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