Impeachment killed, but process still under question

The year 2005 — or more precisely, Sept. 6, 2005 — will be recorded in history books as the date when the House of Representatives killed three impeachment complaints against an embattled President Arroyo.

The President survived her first impeachment, but she could face a new complaint once the one-year protection from a further impeachment petition under the constitutional process expires next year.

Some opposition and party-list representatives are vowing to file a new petition since their "amended" impeachment complaint was killed without being heard. For these lawmakers and other complainants, there was no "closure" to or resolution of the charges of "lying, stealing and cheating" they had leveled against Mrs. Arroyo, which are anchored largely on her alleged wiretapped phone conversations with a man believed to be former election commissioner Virgilio Garcillano.

The supposed conversations were about vote rigging and winning the May 2004 elections by more than a million votes. Indeed, the President won over the late popular actor Fernando Poe Jr. by more than a million votes.

The first failed impeachment process is still under question, and in a sense, is still hanging. A case lodged by some impeachment petitioners, which challenges the House decision to send the impeachment complaints to the graveyard, is pending in the Supreme Court. The High Tribunal, under retired Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr., failed to resolve the constitutional issue the petitioners raised.

The issue is whether the House did the right thing in treating the three impeachment complaints as separate petitions, therefore barring the second and third petitions from being filed, since the Constitution provides that an impeachable officer can be subjected to only one impeachment process within the period of one year.

For opposition congressmen led by Minority Leader Francis Escudero and San Juan Rep. Ronaldo Zamora, who headed the impeachment team, all three complaints were related and should have been consolidated and heard as one. In fact, the third, which was the opposition-crafted petition, amended the first, filed by Marcos loyalist lawyer Oliver Lozano; while the second, introduced by another lawyer, Jose Lopez of Malate, Manila, was a copycat of the first. Lopez, in his petition, told the House that he was adopting the Lozano complaint.

Escudero and his colleagues were not happy about the fact that it was Lozano who beat them to the punch by being the first to respond to the President’s plea that her critics "take your grievances to Congress," instead of resorting to daily street protests that were politically and economically unsettling.

They suspected the filing of the first petition was a set-up, and said as much. They recalled that it was Lozano who, shortly after an impeachment complaint was filed against then President Estrada in 1999, filed a separate petition against then Vice President Arroyo. That petition was endorsed by Surigao del Sur Rep. Prospero Pichay Jr., a staunch Arroyo ally. What added to their suspicions was the fact that the Lozano complaint against the President was endorsed by Rep. Rodante Marcoleta of the party-list group Alagad, who belongs to the majority bloc and who voted with the Arroyo defenders in the "Hello, Garci" hearings, and could therefore be considered an Arroyo ally.

And yet, the opposition resisted calls to file its own petition as early as possible, perhaps believing that public outrage over the charges hurled at Mrs. Arroyo would move the case to the streets.

As if setting up all three complaints for the kill, the House treated them as separate petitions. Thus, the chamber, applying the constitutional standard that an impeachable officer can be subjected to only one impeachment process within a period of one year, dismissed the Lopez petition and the opposition’s amended complaint on the ground that the Lozano petition, which was the first to be filed, barred the following two.

Shortly after dismissing the two complaints, the House proceeded to kill the Lozano petition for lack of merit. Part of the supporting evidence the Marcos loyalist lawyer presented comprised of newspaper clippings of Mrs. Arroyo’s June 27 "I’m sorry" televised confession, in which she admitted talking to an "election official," saying it was a "lapse in judgment," for which she apologized. Though she did not name the official, many people believed it was Garcillano.

Three weeks before her confession, Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye, in a news conference, presented to journalists two compact disk (CD) versions of the controversial "Garci" tapes. Bunye claimed one of the CDs was "original," while the other was "spliced." The original, he said, contained the conversations of the President with a political coordinator named "Gary," not "Garci." The presidential spokesman publicly confirmed it was the distinctive voice of Mrs. Arroyo on the recordings, though he later backpedaled.

"Gary" would later turn out to be Edgar Ruado, chief of staff of Negros Occidental Rep. Ignacio "Iggy" Arroyo, brother of First Gentleman Jose Miguel Arroyo. Ruado’s nickname is "Bong," not "Gary." He presented to the National Bureau of Investigation an affidavit in which he claimed he sounded like the man referred to as "Garci" in the recordings.

The five House committees that have been inquiring into the "Hello, Garci" taped conversations scandal since July have concluded that the conflicting Bunye statements, including the Ruado story, were part of a grand Malacañang cover-up of the controversy.

The committees had been looking for Garcillano, who disappeared in mid-July until he resurfaced three weeks ago, though Makati Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr., who chairs the suffrage and electoral reform committee that is involved in the "Garci" inquiry, believes that no one, especially from the Executive branch, was diligently searching for the elusive former election commissioner.

When Garcillano finally appeared, he added more confusion to the controversy his alleged taped conversations with Mrs. Arroyo had created in the first place.

Garcillano initially claimed it was not his voice heard on the "Garci" recordings but later said he wasn’t sure. He admitted the President called him once, on May 24, 2004, to inquire about her lead over Poe, but did not say why Mrs. Arroyo directed her inquiry to him. After all, he — and for that matter the Commission on Elections — was not involved in the canvass of votes for president and vice president.

No, the President did not ask him to protect her votes, which was the reason Mrs. Arroyo cited in calling the unnamed "election official." Could it be that the President talked to an election official other than Garcillano? "I am not competent to answer that question," Garcillano said, muddling further the already muddled "Hello, Garci" controversy. The apparent unwillingness on the part of the President to speak up has not helped to dispel the matter.

The "Garci" scandal and the opposition’s charges of "lying, cheating and stealing" against Mrs. Arroyo would be revived if the Supreme Court orders the House to reopen the failed impeachment process and to consolidate and hear the three complaints that the chamber had killed.

According to Escudero and Zamora, if what the House did is sustained, all a scoundrel in Malacañang would need do to shield himself from impeachment would be to hire someone to encamp in front of the House of Representatives so he would be the first to file a complaint that is designed to be dismissed.

That would make the impeachment process useless and give rise to a new racket: impeachment petitions for sale.