Romualdez’s big blunder on Sara impeachment

I DON’T know why President Marcos still has confidence in his cousin, House Speaker Martin Romualdez, to undertake their overarching project to take down Vice President Sara Duterte — the single obstacle to their ambition to remain in power beyond 2028.

Romualdez’s latest conspiracy — to impeach the vice president — is his second plot in pursuit of this questionable goal.

The first was the so-called signature campaign by a very dubious organization, Pirma, led by a questionable businessman, launched on Jan. 2, 2024, to amend the Constitution and set up a single-chamber parliament. In such a form of government, Romualdez, with his purported skill in buying off small-time, unscrupulous representatives — especially the 63 party-list congresspersons — would become prime minister.

The project was undertaken by bunglers so obviously that the signatures were either fake or acquired through bribery. The Commission on Elections, just three weeks later on Jan. 24, “indefinitely suspended” the campaign, effectively scuttling it.

While the Marcos clan’s impeachment project — which, if Sara were to be found guilty, would ban her from ever running for the presidency or any public office — has dragged on for six months and consumed so much time and attention from talking and writing heads, paid or not, it is marked by the same kind of missteps by Romualdez as in the Pirma debacle

If the Comelec killed the Pirma campaign, anyone who has studied this issue and looked at its dynamics will have no doubt that this time, the Marcos project is on its way to the gallows, with the Supreme Court as its executioner.

Constitution

Section 3 of Article XI of the 1987 Constitution states: “No impeachment proceedings shall be initiated against the same official more than once within a period of one year.” Romualdez holds the reins over almost everyone in the House of Representatives, even — or especially — the “Red” and “Pink” (Akbayan) congress members. The impeachment plot was hatched just a few months after the Comelec threw the Pirma project into the dustbin.

Perhaps the Reds and the Pinks were promised or given by Romualdez so many tens of millions in incentives and, maybe expecting some bonus for being good servants, rushed to file three complaints, even if sloppily done:

Dec. 2, 2024: Complaint endorsed by Akbayan Citizens’ Action Party Representative Percival Cendaña.

Dec. 4, 2024: Complaint endorsed by Makabayan Koalisyon ng Mamamayan Representatives France L. Castro, Arlene D. Brosas and Raoul Danniel A. Manuel.

Dec.19, 2024: Complaint endorsed by Camarines Sur Reps. Gabriel Bordado Jr. and Rep. Lex Colada of a party-list organization.

These complaints were mostly weak, made by crackpots — such as those claiming that Sara was involved in her father’s “extrajudicial killings” during his war on drugs and her failure to condemn China’s aggressive sovereignty claims in the South China Sea.

Lawyers

Romualdez’s lawyers must have told him that he would just be laughed out of the chamber by the rest of the House members if he processed these for submission to the Senate for trial.

Romualdez had a fourth complaint made that he thought had a chance to remove Sara, filed on Feb. 5, 2025, and endorsed by 215 representatives — although these were just a notch above in seriousness from the first three complaints. Reports, however, came out a few weeks later that those who signed the complaint were told by Romualdez’s minions that their districts would each be given an additional P100 million in funds in the form of dole-outs and P50 million in small-scale infrastructure projects they could easily get kickbacks from.

Romualdez, however, in effect disregarded the constitutional ban that only one verified impeachment complaint can be filed and tried by the Senate per year. This provision is intended to shield a president from being harassed by impeachment complaints so that he or she can do the job.

Romualdez’s way out was to stop, in the case of the first three complaints, the constitutionally mandated procedure for the House to process these for transmittal to the Senate for trial.

The Constitution also mandates a strict process for impeachment to be transmitted to the Senate after the secretary-general gives it to the House speaker:

“A verified complaint for impeachment… shall be included (upon the Speaker’s orders) in the House’s order of business within 10 session days, and referred to the proper committee within three session days thereafter. The committee, after hearing, and by a majority vote of all its members, shall submit its report to the House within 60 session days from such referral, together with the corresponding resolution. The resolution shall be calendared for consideration by the House within 19 session days from receipt thereof. A vote of at least one-third of all the members of the House shall be necessary either to affirm a favorable resolution with the articles of impeachment of the committee, or override its contrary resolution.”

Glorified

The three impeachment complaints were not transmitted by the House’s glorified clerk, the secretary-general (who is not an elected representative), to the speaker, whose office is just adjacent, so that not a single step in the constitutionally mandated processes for an impeachment complaint was undertaken. Secretary-General Reginald Velasco has been a longtime Romualdez minion, starting as an aide to the speaker’s father, Benjamin, when he was ambassador to the US during the Marcos dictatorship. A consummate servant, it is impossible that he was not told by the speaker himself not to submit the complaint to him, thinking that in this manner he would not be mandated, as required by the Constitution, to start the processing of the complaint.

Why didn’t he? In a news article published by ABS-CBN on Jan. 2, 2025, he very lamely said he was asked by “some congressmen” not to forward it to the speaker. Either he was lying or his servility to the speaker extended to all congressmen. But this was in violation of the Constitution, reaffirmed by the House rules on impeachment updated by the 19th Congress.

Sara’s lawyers, in their petition to the Supreme Court, are raising the legal principle upheld in several of its decisions that “what cannot legally be done directly cannot be done indirectly.” That is, if something is prohibited by law, it cannot be evaded by indirect means. If acts that cannot legally be done directly can be done indirectly, then all laws would be illusory.

Romualdez has circumvented the constitutional ban on more than one impeachment complaint per year by pretending not to have received any of the three complaints so that he could not process them according to the procedure the Constitution mandates.

However, what Romualdez did itself was a violation of the Constitution. He was unable to control the three groups under his wing, that they all rushed to file their own impeachment complaints, with a fourth one filed by his closest congress members, that he has violated the one impeachment per year rule.

It is an open-and-shut case. Allowing the fourth impeachment to proceed would make the constitutional ban illusory. Impeachment complaints could be filed every month, harassing a president and preventing him from doing his job in running the state. It would even force him into corruption, as he would have to raise tons of money to pay lawyers to defend him, even against the most mundane complaint.

I don’t think Marcos’ first appointee to the Supreme Court, the Ilocano Raul Villanueva, would be able to convince 12 of the 15 justices appointed by President Duterte to believe Romualdez’s silly justification for skirting the constitutional ban on more than one impeachment case per year.

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Romualdez’s big blunder on Sara impeachment
Source: Breaking News PH