ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the adaptation of presidential impeachments in Brazil and its combination with our legal definition of impeachable offenses, which, during the greater part of the nineteenth century, regulated the legal responsibility of agents of the Imperial Executive Power. It addresses the role of presidential impeachment in the 1988 Constitution, as well as how the Federal Senate’s power to try impeachments was interpreted in the cases of presidents Fernando Collor, in 1992, and Dilma Rousseff, in 2016. Presidential impeachments in Latin America have turned into a damage-control mechanism for resolving conflicts between the legislative and the executive branches. The 1988 Brazilian Constitution blurred the distinction by giving the lower house of Congress the power to merely “authorize” an impeachment process against the President. The Brazilian Supreme Court reinforced the logic when it decided that party representations in the Senate are the relevant actors in impeachment committees.
