Brazilian Congress Staves Off Conflict with STF over Chico Rodrigues and Flordelis

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Even if public opinion is placing it up against the ropes, Congress will not yield. Legislators in both Houses have been working hard to avoid, or at least defer, any punishment of senator Chico Rodrigues who was caught hiding R$33,150 (US$6,630) in his underpants during a police operation, and federal deputy Flordelis Souza accused of having her husband murdered.

In both cases involving the current government’s allies, they are walking on a kind of razor’s edge. On the one hand, they bow to corporatism, protecting their peers from crimes of broad repercussions. On the other hand, they want at least to eliminate this image of shielding to avoid justifying what they consider to be excesses by the Federal Supreme Court (STF), which in recent years has increased the number of cases in which it interferes in the fate of legislative power mandates.

To prevent internal attrition in the Senate, legislators persuaded Chico Rodrigues to take a 121-day leave of absence, more than the 90-day removal period determined by STF Justice Luis Roberto Barroso last week. The hope is that in four months he will be punished by the Ethics Council for hiding money between his buttocks during an operation that found embezzlement in public funds earmarked for fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. Rodrigues denies any criminal act.

In Flordelis’ case, the trend among her fellow federal deputies is one of inaction. Also due to the coronavirus, the committees are stalled. Therefore, despite the House’s opinion that her removal proceeding should continue, nothing happens because the deputies’ ethics committee has been inoperative since March.

By law, it is up to the House and Senate to decide on removals or annulments of its deputies. However, the STF’s removal of legislators from office has become commonplace over the past four years, when at least five deputies and senators have been, in theory, pushed out of office by court decisions.

They were Senators Renan Calheiros, Aécio Neves, and Chico Rodrigues, plus federal Deputies Eduardo Cunha and Wilson Santiago. In practice, only Cunha was removed from office and was later stripped of his position and arrested as part of Operation Lava Jato. Renan disregarded a decision that would remove him from the Senate Presiding Board in 2016 and ultimately secured a second judicial decision in his favor.

The following year, Neves had his removal overturned by the Senate, which annulled the STF decision. The same occurred with Santiago last February, who was only two months away from the Chamber. Chico Rodrigues eventually requested a leave of absence from his position. His son and first alternate, Pedro Arthur Rodrigues, took over his seat.

For Yuri Carajelescov, a law Ph.D. and professor at the São Paulo Legislative Institute, some issues should not be dealt with by the judiciary, at the risk of compromising the whole democratic system under which the powers are independent. “The Supreme Court has interfered too much with other powers, which to me is wrong.”

According to the expert, the ideal would be for Congress to take the lead and decide on its own to initiate a disciplinary proceeding against Chico Rodrigues, without the need to be prompted by the Court. “What is at stake is popular sovereignty.”

For those following the intricacies of power in Brasília, the movements in the case of Chico Rodrigues aroused a dubious feeling of self-protection and interference among the powers. The main proponents of this internal cooling-off process were the Senate president Davi Alcolumbre, the president of the Ethics Council, Jayme Campos, and the main leader of the Centrão caucus in the Chamber, Ciro Nogueira.

In addition to protecting a co-worker and a party colleague, senators want to avoid any clash with the Supreme Court at a key moment for Alcolumbre. The current Senate President wants the Supreme Court to revise the law and authorize him to run for re-election as President of the Senate. Alcolumbre assessed that the full Supreme Court would ratify Justice Barroso’s unilateral decision. Pressured by the controversial money in the underpants, many senators would not feel safe in overruling the decision.

So they slapped a kind of blindfold on their own eyes and feigned not to see the charges against the senator, of wide public resonance. Chico Rodrigues will be out of office until the second half of February. By then, the election of the Presiding Board, i.e., the renewal of the Senate leadership, will have occurred.

“It was hard for Chico to prove the origin of the funds. It is difficult to hold him in office without this, no matter how many of us wanted it,” a governing senator told EL PAÍS. In his defense, Chico Rodrigues sent messages to his peers saying that the money seized in his home and underpants was intended to pay some of his employees. He asked not to be convicted in advance and said that he has been massacred, humiliated, and ridiculed.

Kássio Nunes Marques’s appointment

A factor that has not been ignored at this time is also Jair Bolsonaro’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Federal Judge Kassio Nunes Marques would undergo confirmation hearings on Wednesday by senators from the Constitution and Justice Committee. The committee and the full Senate are expected to approve his appointment to the post by a large majority of votes on the same day or, at the latest, on Thursday. At least 44 senators have already expressed their support for his approval – three more than the minimum required – seeing no obstacle in the evidence that he cheated on his résumé and plagiarized a friend’s academic text.

Marques had the backing of his fellow Paiauinse, Senator Ciro Nogueira, a key player in the Centrão, the amorphous center-right bloc that recently cemented its support for the Planalto. Judge Nuno Marques’s name was suggested to the President by his son Flávio Bolsonaro, and by the family’s ex-attorney, Frederick Wassef. The expectation that binds Nogueira’s Centrão to the Bolsonaro clan is that Kassio Nunes Marques will align himself with the Supreme Court bloc that perceives “excesses” and the demonization of politicians in Lava Jato and similar cases.

Jair Bolsonaro allegedly dreamed of seeing the new Justice handle the case investigating his alleged interference in the Federal Police, an action prompted by accusations of his ex-Minister Sérgio Moro. The case had been in the hands of Justice Celso de Mello, whose seat Kassio would fill.

However, this hope ended recently. At Moro’s petition, STF Chief Justice Luiz Fux announced that the case involving the President would be redistributed, that is, there would be an election-by-lot to determine who would take over the case. The name drawn was that of Justice Alexandre de Morais, who also leads the case investigating fake news and the rallies against the Supreme Court.

Source: El País