Proposed update to Brazil’s impeachment rules seems like a response to Bolsonaro

Earlier in December, a group of legal scholars assembled by the Senate submitted a proposal to reform Brazil’s rules for impeaching presidents. The group was led by Supreme Court Justice Ricardo Lewandowski, who presided over former President Dilma Rousseff’s 2016 impeachment trial during his two-year stint as the court’s chief justice.

Among other things, the draft proposes that the Senate should take two separate votes when impeaching a president: one to remove them from office, and another to ban him/her from running for office for up to eight years.

Currently, Brazil’s Constitution defines that an impeached president is both removed from office and automatically suspended from politics for eight years. However, Justice Lewandowski upturned that rule during Ms. Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016, unilaterally deciding that lawmakers would vote on the issues separately.

A majority of senators decided to spare Ms. Rousseff from the eight-year politics ban. Two years after her ousting, she unsuccessfully tried to win a Senate seat representing her native state of Minas Gerais.

Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle originally intended the lead character to die in a blaze of glory in his 1893 story “The Final Problem.” But he was pressured to “revive” the detective years later, in one of the most notable examples of what literature calls “retroactive continuity,” or retconning. 

Justice Lewandowski, by altering constitutional rules to suit his understanding, is engaging in his own use of the literary device.

What is an impeachable offense?

The proposal aims to establish clear criteria for exactly what constitutes an impeachable offense. Today’s law is vague, allowing legislators to interpret what they believe passes that threshold.

But some of the new proposals come across as direct responses to four years of Jair Bolsonaro, with many of the specific conducts that...