Wednesday was a sad day for those who looked forward to the free entertainment provided by yet another traumatic impeachment exercise. The Senate overwhelmingly voted to archive the defective impeachment complaint sent to it by the House.
Many of us sat for nearly six hours, glued to the proceedings, anxious to be clarified. The experience was both satisfying and exasperating.
It was satisfying because the unholy politics underpinning this particular impeachment effort – that only the willfully blind refuse to see – was finally put front and center by senators unwilling to be reduced to pawns in a poorly disguised power play.
Senator Imee Marcos put the issue squarely: naming Speaker Martin Romualdez as the prime mover of this doomed impeachment effort. Senators Francis Escudero and Alan Cayetano brought luminosity to the real dynamics behind this sordid – albeit sloppy – impeachment play.
It was exasperating because, in the last analysis, archiving the case was the only real choice the Senate had, given that the Supreme Court ruled the impeachment case unconstitutional. The ruling was immediately executory. The Senate debate was entirely academic.
Rejecting the Court’s ruling, which was the real option pursued by the noisy but increasingly irrelevant minority, meant precipitating a constitutional crisis. That is too high a price to pay to salvage an impeachment complaint that was imperious as it was whimsical.
It will be immensely more fruitful to try and find the 5,500 flood control projects for which P2 trillion was spent and yet remain invisible to the naked eye. If we indeed want accountability, this is where to look for it.
It will be immensely more productive to parse the 2024 and 2025 national budgets. The 2024 budget was tampered with to assist efforts to revise the Constitution and thus secure the political futures of those who rule today. The 2025 budget was thoroughly mangled in aid of reelection. Millions of Filipinos were injured because of this.
The sum of all the systematic looting that happened impoverishes the future of the next generations. It caused vital infrastructure projects to be deferred and bloated our indebtedness.
The minority senators fought a passionate but ultimately doomed battle to postpone the inevitable. In the end, the minority shriveled to four. Migz Zubiri and Loren Legarda voted with the majority. Ping Lacson abstained.
The three senators at least saved themselves from the sorry fate of the Flippant Four.
The four minority senators wanted to keep the case on the table rather than in the archives. They held out the possibility that the unanimous Supreme Court ruling might somehow be reversed.
To enlarge the possibility of a Court reversal of its comprehensive ruling, Sen. Risa Hontiveros cited two instances where the magistrates supposedly reversed itself after ruling unanimously. Through the magic of Google Search or some AI application, her phone suddenly produced two cases where this supposedly happened.
The very next day, the Supreme Court spokesperson clarified that the 2009 decision on League of Municipalities versus Comelec was not a unanimous one. The other case Hontiveros cited is still being researched.
At any rate, her argument was pointless. The recent Court decision on the impeachment of Sara Duterte rests on its own merits.
Hontiveros was betrayed by her support staff. She was arguing against archiving the impeachment case by resorting to fake news. Considering she has been accused of witness tampering in other cases, this peddling of fake news further taxes her credibility.
Facing the certainty of defeat in the roll call vote, Senator Tito Sotto prayed that God have mercy on the majority. That sounds like something a false prophet might say before being burned at the stake. It delivers no substantive argument.
The Supreme Court ruling on the impeachment case may be considered a juridical watershed. It sets procedural standards for impeaching public officials so that this method for removal is not abused nor used too casually. Our legislature is in dire need of such standards.
That ruling may also be a historic political turning point.
Speaker Martin Romualdez is the most obvious loser in last Wednesday’s Senate vote. Although he clumsily tried to hide his hand in the impeachment effort against his most likely 2028 rival, he cannot evade blame for this flustered effort.
This is his second major strategic defeat. The first one was that equally clumsy attempt at Charter change that was aborted without much ceremony.
Increasingly, his gang of congressmen appears like our version of the Keystone Cops: reckless busybodies who never understood what they were doing. Yet they want to control the nation’s fate. What a chilling thought.
His only “wins” are the mangling of the 2024 and 2025 national budgets that allowed his minions to loot public funds freely and bring grief to everybody else. His real challenge, on his second term as Speaker, is how to moderate his gang’s greed.
The civil society groups who formed a Bongo Line behind Romualdez’s impeachment ploy share in his political defeat.
These groups can only be animated by vilification campaigns. Hate is their fuel. Slander is their weapon.
When the nation’s highest tribunal ruled the impeachment to be infirm, they demonized the magistrates, labeling the font of our judicial system a “Duterte court.” When the Senate voted to archive the case, they labeled the institution a “Duterte Senate.”
sNow they have no cause to rally for.