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 A vote in the full lower house is expected to take place on
Sunday. If two-thirds vote in favor, the impeachment will be sent to
the Senate.
If the upper house decides by a simple majority to put Rousseff on
trial, she will immediately be suspended for up to six months while
the Senate decides her fate, and Vice President Michel Temer will
take office as acting president.
It would be the first impeachment of a Brazilian president since
1992 when Fernando Collor de Mello faced massive protests for his
ouster on corruption charges and resigned moments before his
conviction by the Senate.
A former leftist guerrilla, Rousseff has denied any wrongdoing and
rallied the rank and file of her Workers' Party to oppose what she
has called a coup against a democratically elected president.
Speaking to thousands of supporters in Rio de Janeiro, Rousseff's
predecessor and Workers' Party founder Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
said Brazilian business elites were pressuring lawmakers to remove
the president. Lula, who is under investigation in a graft probe,
said he had convinced Rousseff to return to policies that favored
Brazil's poor.
Caught in a political storm fueled by Brazil's worst recession in
decades and the country's biggest corruption scandal, Rousseff has
lost key coalition allies in Congress, including her main partner,
vice president Temer's PMDB party.
 The rift between Rousseff and her vice president reached breaking
point on Monday after an audio message of Temer calling for a
government of national unity was released apparently by mistake,
further muddying Brazil's political water.
Temer's 14-minute audio message sent to members of his own PMDB
party via the WhatsApp messaging app showed he was preparing to take
over if Rousseff is forced from office.
The audio was posted on the website of the Folha de S.Paulo
newspaper and confirmed to Reuters by Temer's aides as authentic.
Aides said it was accidentally released and they quickly sent
another message asking legislators to disregard it.
In his message, Temer said he did not want to get ahead of events,
but he had to show the country he was ready to lead it if needed.
"We need a government of national salvation and national unity,"
Temer said in the audio. "We need to unite all the political
parties, and all the parties should be ready to collaborate to drag
Brazil out of this crisis."
Rousseff's chief of staff Jaques Wagner called the vice president a
"conspirator" and said he should resign if Rousseff survives
impeachment.
"Having joined the conspiracy, he should resign when it is defeated,
because the climate will become unbearable," Wagner told reporters.
Wagner said the government will continue working to muster enough
votes to block impeachment in the lower house, encouraged by the
fact that in committee the opposition had not won the two thirds it
will need in the plenary.
The committee vote, however, is expected to sway undecided lawmakers
to vote for Rousseff's removal, said Claudio Couto, a politics
professor at the Fundacao Getulio Vargas think tank.
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"It has a snowball effect. With each approval, the chances of
impeachment clearing the next chamber increases," Couto said. "The
wider the margin, the more momentum impeachment will gather."
The Brasilia-based consultancy Arko Advice said committee votes for
impeachment were higher than expected and it raised to 65 percent
the odds of Rousseff being unseated by Congress.
POLARIZED COUNTRY
The latest moves in Brazil's political crisis have the country on
edge as it faces not only a government meltdown but its worst
recession in decades. The political chaos in the capital, Brasilia,
is playing out less than 100 days before the nation plays host to
the first Olympic Games to be held in South America - an event that
will cast the world's eyes on Brazil.
The battle over Rousseff's impeachment has polarized the nation of
200 million people and brought the government of Latin America's
largest economy to a virtual standstill.
The proposed impeachment is also taking place as Brazil faces its
largest corruption investigation, targeting a sprawling kickback
scheme at state-run oil company Petrobras.
Prosecutors say billions in bribes were paid over several years and
have implicated not only members of Rousseff's Workers' Party but
members of the opposition leading the charge to impeach her.
Eduardo Cunha, the speaker of Brazil's lower house, a Rousseff enemy
who is guiding the impeachment proceedings, faces charges of
accepting millions in bribes in connection to the Petrobras case,
while the head of Brazil's Senate is also caught up in the
investigation.
To battle to prevent impeachment approval in the full lower house
vote, Rousseff's government is trying to win over lawmakers by
offering government jobs that became vacant when the PMDB quit her
governing coalition two weeks ago.
The Brazilian real <BRBY> strengthened nearly 3 percent before
Monday's vote to an eight-month peak on expectations that the
committee would decide to impeach Rousseff. Investors are betting
that her removal will issue in more business-friendly policies to
pull Brazil's economy out of a tailspin.
(Additional reporting by Brad Brooks in Brasilia and Pilar Olivares
in Rio de Janeiro; Writing by Anthony Boadle; Editing by Alistair
Bell, Peter Cooney and Michael Perry)
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