I was reading about Brazil's impeachment tradition & what's striking is that two of the first four post-military rule presidents were impeached. That's pretty striking! In wondering why Brazil had such a robust removal politics, it occurred to me that maybe the parties deny each other's legitimacy?
Maybe, but there are lots of parties in Brazil and not all of them involve cachaça.
In the US, removal politics is severely underdeveloped. It seems to me this is due to previously powerful norms of responsibility & bipartisanship in the practices of oversight, as well as norms of forbearance. Removal politics is the antithesis of a politics of forbearance; it's a maximalist claim.
So it makes sense that removal politics will be more robust where the informal norms generating a stable politics of forbearance are weak or lacking, such as a country that recently built a pro-democracy majority strong enough to transition away from autocracy—that is, a 'new' democracy like Brazil.
There a lot of Brazilians on Bluesky, so please correct me if I'm wrong; my knowledge of this is very shallow right now, but this account would comport with much of my other thinking about removal and the three modes of politics (friend-enemy, pluralist, technocratic).
Oh yeah informal forbearance isn't something sacrosanct around here. Sometimes it happens (see the "end 6x1" issue), but we're not afraid of a scorched earth approach either