When Congress passed the 14th Amendment in 1868, it focused on embedding the civil rights of the formerly enslaved in the Constitution. But the framers of the amendment also included a clause meant to keep those who served the Confederacy from holding public office.

This “insurrection clause” of the U.S. Constitution—Section 3 of the 14th Amendment—disqualifies anyone from holding public office who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States. It’s this clause that the Colorado Supreme Court invoked to strike Donald Trump’s name from the Republican primary ballot. Not surprisingly, Trump has fought back, taking his case all the way to the federal Supreme Court.

In front of the Supreme Court, the legal team of Donald Trump has tried to argue that the specific language of the clause doesn’t apply to the former president. The clause, Trump’s lawyers argue, refers only to those who took oaths to support the Constitution “as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State.” Donald Trump was the president of the United States, they say, not an “officer.”

Today, Trump is running for reelection in the United States with a better than average chance of success. Bolsonaro, meanwhile, has been banned from holding office in Brazil until 2030 and faces even more serious charges in connection to his coup plotting. How could such similar circumstances produce such divergent results?

It’s really quite remarkable that the Supreme Court hasn’t laughed this argument out of the courtroom (as a lower court essentially did when Trump’s legal team claimed he had total, king-like immunity from prosecution). The drafters of the 14th Amendment didn’t specify “president” because they couldn’t imagine that the head of the United States would foment a rebellion against those same United States. They were addressing the specific reality of the Civil War, in which President Abraham Lincoln was trying to hold together “a house divided.” To put “president” on the list of people barred from holding office would have seemed ridiculous: The president was logically the defender of the nation, not its saboteur.

How the framers of that amendment would have shuddered at the spectacle of January 6.

But plenty of countries in Latin America have faced precisely that scenario, of a leader or former leader who has used force to seize absolute power. And that’s why the Brazilian case is so important. While Americans are debating esoteric clauses of the Constitution in an effort to determine Trump’s place on or off the ballot, Brazil is taking far more effective steps to ensure that Jair Bolsonaro never leads the country again.

It seemed at first as though Brazil’s would-be dictator Jair Bolsonaro, elected in 2018 to the presidency, was following Donald Trump’s playbook. During the run-up to the presidential election in 2022, when he faced off against former president Luiz Inazio Lula da Silva, Bolsonaro claimed that the contest was rigged against him, that the voting machines were compromised, that the election would be stolen. As in the United States, the final vote was indeed close. Like Trump, Bolsonaro refused to concede.

As soon as the election was called for Lula, Bolsonaro supporters massed in front of military installations, urging the Army to intervene. Brazil, unlike the United States, has a history of military coups. And Bolsonaro, it turns out, had prepared the ground in advance for just such a coup.

While Trump focused on recounts, “finding” additional votes in Georgia, gathering a separate slate of electors for the Electoral College, and ultimately pressuring the vice president to withhold certification of the Electoral College results, Bolsonaro went a different route. He appealed directly to the top echelon of the military to launch a coup. Only the head of the Navy warmed to the idea.

In the waning days of his presidency, Bolsonaro and his allies did what they could to persuade the head of the Army, Freire Gomes, to support a military coup. But he held firm, even in the face of a smear campaign that characterized him as a traitor to the nation.

Then on January 8, 2023—after Lula had already taken office—Bolsonaro supporters took matters into their own hands. Like their counterparts two years earlier in Washington, D.C., they rioted in the center of the federal capital, occupying the buildings that represent the three branches of the Brazilian government. It took security forces five hours to evict the protestors and secure the buildings.

Aside from Bolsonaro’s appeal to the military, a much surer bet in Brazil than it would have been in the United States,........

© Common Dreams