Brazil Senate debates opening impeachment end game

Brazil's Senate opened debate today before voting on whether to send suspended president Dilma Rousseff to an impeachment trial, bringing the Olympic host country's political crisis to a climax.
At the start of the marathon session, Supreme Court President Ricardo Lewandowski reminded senators that they were about to "exercise one of the most serious tasks under the constitution."
The Senate president, Renan Calheiros, also underlined the gravity of the impeachment process, which Rousseff, a one-time Marxist guerrilla, has likened to a coup d'etat.
"I want to emphasize the gravity of the decision that we will soon take," he said. "I ask that we set aside as much as possible our party political convictions."

Rousseff's opponents only need a simple majority of the 81 senators' votes to open an impeachment trial. They look set to clear the threshold easily, although the debate is expected to stretch into the early hours of Wednesday.
It is the final vote before the one that will decide Rousseff's ultimate political fate, when a two-thirds majority would be needed to strip her of her power and end 13 years of leftist rule in Brazil. That vote is expected to take place around the end of August, just days after the Rio Olympics end.

The Senate suspended Rousseff, Brazil's first woman president, on May 12 over accusations of illegal accounting practices and fiddling the budget to mask the slump in the economy.

The timing could hardly be more awkward for Brazil, which was meant to be showcasing its burgeoning economic clout and political stability with South America's first Olympic Games in full swing.
Instead, unpopular interim president Michel Temer -- formerly the vice president -- is struggling to drag the country out of its worst recession in decades as the Senate debates what to do with his former boss and bitter enemy.
Rousseff is accused of spending money without congressional approval and taking out unauthorized loans from state banks to make the national budget look better than it really was as she campaigned for re-election in 2014.

She says such maneuvers were common practice under previous administrations and do not amount to an impeachable offense.
Her allies from the Workers' Party point out that many of the lawmakers accusing her are implicated in corruption cases arguably far more serious than accounting tricks.