The Senate’s Suicide: How Davi Alcolumbre, Rodrigo Pacheco, and Their Predecessors Built the Scaffold on Which Gilmar Mendes Just Hung the People’s Last Remaining Check on Judicial Tyranny
For years, Brazilian conservatives begged the Senate to do its constitutional duty: hold the Supreme Federal Court accountable when it abandoned the text of the Constitution and began to legislate, censor, and punish from the bench. The Senate’s answer was always the same: silence, delay, cowardice, and finally, enthusiastic collaboration. Yesterday, December 3, 2025, Minister Gilmar Mendes delivered the final act of this long betrayal: with a single precautionary ruling he rewrote the 1950 Impeachment Law, stripped every Brazilian citizen of the right to file a crime-of-responsibility complaint against a Supreme Court justice, transferred that monopoly to a politicized Prosecutor-General, raised the Senate admission quorum from a simple majority to two-thirds, and declared that no justice can ever be impeached for the content of his votes. In short, he crowned the Court.
None of this would have been possible without the active, prolonged complicity of the Senate leadership, first under Rodrigo Pacheco (2021–2025) and now under Davi Alcolumbre (2025–present).
1. The Burial Factory
From 2019 onward, more than 100 impeachment petitions against ministers of the Supreme Court were formally presented to the Senate. Seventeen targeted Alexandre de Moraes alone. Dozens more targeted Gilmar Mendes, Luís Roberto Barroso, and others. Not a single one was ever sent to the Constitution and Justice Committee for a simple preliminary opinion. Every single request was “archived” by presidential act, without vote, without explanation, without shame. The technical justification was always the same flimsy mantra: “The President of the Senate has the exclusive prerogative to assess the juridical adequacy of the complaint.” In practice, that meant the President could sit on them forever, and forever is exactly what they did.
2. Rodrigo Pacheco’s Masterclass in Inaction
Pacheco turned archival into an industrial process. During his presidency the Senate received dozens of new petitions, many with signatures from more than 30 senators, far exceeding any reasonable threshold for at least opening proceedings. His response was to create a special “juridical analysis” limbo where complaints disappeared for months and then quietly died. When pressed by the opposition in 2023 and 2024, Pacheco would solemnly declare that “institutional stability” required that the Senate not be transformed into a “court of appeals against Supreme Court decisions.” Translation: the Supreme Court can do whatever it wants, and the Senate will applaud.
3. Davi Alcolumbre’s Open Defiance
When Alcolumbre took the chair in February 2025, conservatives hoped for a change. They were brutally disabused. In August 2025, after a 47-hour occupation of the plenary, the opposition managed to collect 41 signatures, half the Senate, demanding the impeachment of Alexandre de Moraes. Alcolumbre’s public response was chilling in its arrogance: “Even if you had 81 signatures, I would not put it on the agenda.” He did not say he would study it. He did not say he would send it to the CCJ. He said he would not put it on the agenda, period. That was the moment the Senate ceased to be a counterweight and openly declared itself a vassal.
4. The Final Payoff
Gilmar Mendes did not act in a vacuum. He knew, because Alcolumbre and Pacheco had demonstrated it for six straight years, that the Senate leadership would never allow a single impeachment to reach the floor. The “risk” of abusive, frivolous, or politicized complaints that Mendes now invokes to justify his ruling was never real; the Senate had already neutralized it by refusing to process even the most serious ones. What Mendes has now done is simply to formalize the Senate’s surrender, to transform a cowardly practice into untouchable jurisprudence. The Senate spent years proving it would protect the Court from the people; the Court has now returned the favor by protecting itself from the Senate, and, more importantly, from the sovereign people the Senate claims to represent.
5. The People Are Left Naked
The Brazilian citizen has now been stripped of the last remaining democratic instrument that the 1988 Constitution left in his hands. You can no longer denounce a minister who shuts down newspapers, jails congressmen without trial, or invents crimes to keep a former president off the ballot. That right has been transferred exclusively to the Prosecutor-General, an office currently occupied by a man confirmed by the narrowest margin in decades and who, weeks before Gilmar’s ruling, filed an opinion begging for exactly these changes. The Senate, which once pretended to be the people’s shield, spent years sharpening the blade that has now been turned against its own throat, and ours.
The conservative tragedy is not merely that the Supreme Court overreached; it is that the Senate, at every single opportunity, chose to kneel instead of stand. Pacheco and Alcolumbre did not merely fail to check the Court; they actively trained it to believe that no check would ever come. Yesterday, Gilmar Mendes simply collected the bill they themselves had run up.
The crown is now firmly in place. The Senate forged it, polished it, and, with its own trembling hands, placed it on the Court’s head. The people, who once had at least the theoretical right to demand accountability, have been told, in the clearest possible terms, that their voice no longer matters. The era of the Senate as a co-equal branch is over. The era of judicial absolutism, built brick by brick with the enthusiastic collaboration of those who were elected to prevent it, has begun.