By Anthony Boadle
BRASILIA (Reuters) - A controversial secret ballot that stacked an impeachment committee with opponents of President Dilma Rousseff was found legitimate on Wednesday by the Supreme Court justice who suspended proceedings against her last week.
Judge Luiz Fachin's unexpected recommendation must still be voted on by the full court, but it was a new setback for the unpopular Rousseff in her battle to survive getting impeached for allegedly breaching Brazil's budget laws last year.
Fachin, who was named to the top court by Rousseff in June, also argued before his peers that the Senate does not have any authority to review the grounds for impeachment once the lower house votes to admit the case by two-thirds of its members.
The court will vote on the case on Thursday afternoon. If it adopts his view, the Senate would have to start an impeachment trial right away after the house approval, and Rousseff would be suspended as president, with Vice President Michel Temer taking over during the Senate trial that can last six months.
"The house decides on the admissibility of impeachment, the Senate judges ... it must necessarily begin a trial," Fachin told the 11-member court, rejecting most of the complaints lodged against the impeachment case by the Communist Party of Brazil, a small coalition ally.
The impeachment proceedings, started this month by Rousseff's archenemy, lower house Speaker Eduardo Cunha, risk plunging Brazil deeper into political turmoil as the government struggles to tackle the deepest recession since the early 1990s and dozens of politicians, among them Cunha, are the targets of a massive corruption investigation.
The impeachment is based on an opposition accusation that Rousseff used accounting tricks to allow ramped-up spending during her re-election campaign last year. She says she committed no crime and the bid to oust her is a "coup" against her democratic election.
The secret ballot in the lower house, convened by Cunha, allowed members of Rousseff's fragile ruling coalition to break ranks and vote against the unpopular president. Opponents of Rousseff were able to approve an impeachment committee stacked with legislators hostile to her.
However, Fachin stepped in to prevent the impeachment committee from meeting, pending a Supreme Court ruling.
If the house committee gives the green light to impeachment proceedings, two-thirds of the entire lower house must vote to move ahead with them. Rousseff would then be tried before the Senate, which would also require a two-thirds majority to remove her from office.
Rousseff is believed to have enough votes currently to block impeachment in the lower chamber - 171 of the 513 seats - though a growing rift with her main coalition ally, the fractious Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, threatens to reduce her narrow margin.
Rousseff's position is stronger in the Senate, her last line of defence, but if the impeachment case drags on into next year public pressure on the Senate to remove her could grow due to the recession that is fuelling inflation and unemployment.
(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Tom Brown)
