If Sara is ousted as VP, we’ll have 18 years of Marcos rule

IF Vice President Sara Duterte is removed from her post through an impeachment trial — which would also ban her from ever holding public office again — the Marcos-Romualdez clan could rule the country for at least 18 years, two years short of the 20 years that Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was president and then, dictator.

Sara certainly wasn’t being melodramatic when her very first statement in her press conference after the House of Representatives announced that they had the minimum votes needed to ask the Senate to convene an impeachment trial: “God save the Philippines.” This is one of those rare times I do hope there is a deity.

If Sara is removed through an impeachment trial, as sure as the sun sets in the east, President Marcos Jr. will appoint — subject though to the Congress’ majority approval — his cousin Speaker Martin Romualdez to fill the post. This will enhance Romualdez’s name recall and expand his political reach to win the 2028 presidential election. The Marcoses are also superstitious and wouldn’t want to challenge the purported jinx that no speaker of the House has ever been elected president. (Under the Constitution’s Article VII, Section 9, if Sara is removed as vice president, “the President shall nominate a Vice-President from among the Members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, who shall assume office upon confirmation by a majority vote of all the Members of both Houses of the Congress, voting separately.”)

Despite being reviled by many Filipinos, it would be a walk in the park for Romualdez to win in the 2028 presidential elections. He has proven his capacity and immorality to mobilize billions of pesos in taxpayers’ money for his political campaigns. Only Sara has the massive political force to stop Romualdez.

It will be the turn of Marcos’ son Alexander to sit on the throne through the next elections in 2034, as he turns 40 two months before the May polls that year, the Constitution’s minimum age to run for president.

Ironic

It is certainly ironic and a testament to the rottenness of the Communist Party that its Makabayan party-list representatives are at the vanguard of the plot to perpetuate the Marcoses’ rule. The 50,000 communist cadres and Red fighters killed in their struggle since the 1970s to overthrow the elder Marcos’ regime must be screaming from their graves. So have the Yellows demonstrated again their notorious stupidity by joining the Reds in Marcos’ blitz to remove Sara.

This impeachment conspiracy by the Marcos-Romualdez cabal is nothing but a political assassination plot against Sara: she is the only obstacle to this cursed clan’s plan to remain in power beyond 2028. After recapturing power 40 years after it was toppled and reviled, the Marcos clan’s revenge has only just started.

However, this is just the Marcos-Romualdez clan’s wishful scenario, which I hope is enough warning. I’m sure it will be foiled just like its first plot to amend the Constitution to allow Romualdez to become prime minister in a parliamentary system was stopped in its tracks early last year by the Senate.

Impeachments are nothing but political duels, and their outcomes do not hinge on any legal process but on which political force is powerful and clever enough to dominate the other.

President Estrada was on the way to being found guilty by the Senate impeachment court in 2001. It was the forces of his predecessor Fidel Ramos and the Yellows that wanted to remove him from power. Ramos was convinced Estrada was planning to jail him for corruption in the sale of the Public Estates Authority the reclaimed land along Manila Bay to the Amari Coastal Bay Resources Corp., allegedly at grossly undervalued prices. The deal was estimated to involve around P1.8 billion in kickbacks. The Cojuangco clan, on the other hand, wanted to make sure the Supreme Court ruled favorably on its case to have its Hacienda Luisita awarded billions of pesos in compensation for its fake land reform.

Estrada

Despite his popularity, Estrada — a babe in the political woods, really — was no match for the Yellow “Coryista forces” that included the self-proclaimed “civil society” organizations combined with Ramos’ military-oligarch complex. Ramos was also a master of Machiavellian plotting. Estrada’s impeachment was aborted as EDSA 2 broke out against him. He fled Malacañang, escaping being officially found guilty, which spared him from the lifetime ban on occupying any government post, so he later was elected mayor of Manila.

Chief Justice Renato Corona was removed from his post since the powerful Cojuangco clan at the center of the Yellow forces needed to remove him from the Supreme Court in order to reverse the Hacienda Luisita ruling in its favor. Corona — much of his career spent solely in the judiciary — had no political forces behind him to speak of. The Aquino administration even made sure the Senate voted to remove him by undertaking the anomalous Disbursement Acceleration Program that gave all but three of the senator-judges P100 to P150 million in funds they could use for whatever projects they wanted so they could skim off this money.

The Yellows undertook four impeachment complaints against President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo for various reasons so she would be removed from power in order to pave the way for their leader, Sen. Mar Roxas, to succeed her as a president. None was endorsed by the House of Representatives not only because of the flimsiness of the charges but because she maintained Congress’ trust in her capability to lead the nation through those economically turbulent times.

In the case of the impeachment plot against Sara, Marcos doesn’t have enough political force to win this contest. The Reds and the Yellows, despite their strong influence over media, are really noisy political pygmies. The Marcoses control the House of Representatives only through government funds they are able to channel to the congressmen. Their hard-core supporters are approximately the 30 representatives from the Ilocano-speaking and Leyte congressional districts. The Dutertes, however, have at least 57 representatives from Mindanao, although, as demonstrated in the impeachment voting, many of these can be bribed.

Trust

More importantly, Sara and her father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, have maintained Filipinos’ trust in them, although declining because of the Marcos-Romualdez cabal’s intense propaganda. Their charisma, however, is undiminished. By contrast, Marcos Jr.’s trust among Filipinos is merely the residue from his father’s 20-year rule; Romualdez has nothing.

Even the so-called Marcos loyalists and the Ilocanos see him as a spoiled brat so different from his father, with absolutely no rapport with ordinary people. Marcos would have lost in the 2022 elections if the Dutertes had not thrown their support behind him, which turned out to be the biggest mistake they ever made.

A strong indicator that Marcos has no support in the Senate enough for it to decide Sara guilty is that not a single one of the senators has ever said he or she had trust in him as president — not even his sister Imee.

Imagine the spectacle of an impeachment trial in which Sara’s father, with his down-to-earth and witty eloquence, is one of her defense lawyers — such a dramatic father-defends-bullied-daughter scenario that would further endear them to Filipinos that an EDSA III could even break out. Not a single one of the senators will dare cross swords with him. Would they want to be portrayed as one of the bullies?

To borrow Shakespeare’s words, this impeachment is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It’s a waste of our and the Congress’ time, and taxpayers’ money.

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If Sara is ousted as VP, we’ll have 18 years of Marcos rule
Source: Breaking News PH