Blunderer Romualdez should blame himself, not the Supreme Court
IT’s a total debacle for the Marcos-Romualdez plot to stop through impeachment Vice President Sara Duterte’s winning the presidency in 2024.
The Supreme Court on July 25 voted unanimously to rule unconstitutional and void ab initio (invalid from its inception) the impeachment complaint signed by 215 House representatives allegedly bribed by Speaker Martin Romualdez.
Two weeks later, 19 of the 24-member Senate declared their adherence to the decision, and “archived” the complaint — a parliamentary euphemism for throwing it to the rubbish bin.
House Speaker Martin Romualdez has only himself — and his minion, House secretary-general Reginald Velasco — to blame for this political catastrophe. The Supreme Court had no choice but to rule the complaint void ab initio as it clearly violated the constitutional provision that only one impeachment complaint can be filed each year.
Romualdez and his gang’s complaint was the fourth in two months.
Either they were getting very wrong legal advice or, because of hubris, they thought they could get away with their blunder. Indeed, ignorance and hubris are an insane mix.
The Constitution’s Article XI, Section 3(5), 1987 Constitution very clearly stated: “No impeachment proceedings shall be initiated against the same official more than once within a period of one year.” This provision was intended to prevent impeachments from being used to harass an impeachable official, such as the president and vice president.
The Constitution then provides for the procedure before the complaint can be sent to the Senate to try the officer: “A verified complaint for impeachment may be filed by any member of the House of Representatives, or by any citizen upon a resolution of endorsement by any member thereof, which shall be included in the Order of Business within 10 session days, and referred to the proper committee [which the House rules had determined to be the committee on justice] within three session days thereafter. The committee, after a hearing, and by a majority vote of all its members, shall submit its report to the House within sixty (60) session days from such referral, together with the corresponding resolution.”
Even with his tight control of the House members, Romualdez let them endorse three impeachment complaints made in December by communist cadres disguised as party-list representatives or by crackpots disguised as guardians of democracy.
WPS
The complaints clearly showed that these were not really studied ones, but were filed merely to remove Sara from office and ban her from seeking the presidency in 2028. For instance, one accused Sara of “failure to oppose China’s aggressive claims in the West Philippine Sea (WPS).” Another accused her of being involved in the alleged “Davao Death Squads” when she was mayor of the city, obviously confusing her with her father.
Apparently forgetting the three complaints, only on Feb. 5 did Romualdez get 215 representatives to sign the fourth “studied” serious impeachment complaint that he and his cabal had formulated. This would later be revealed as having been achieved through bribery, using taxpayers’ money intended as financial help for the poor.
Romualdez — perhaps realizing too late that the three complaints could violate the one-year rule — thought he could go around this constitutional ban by not acting on them as required by the Constitution.
He did not put the complaints in the House’s Order of Business (the list of items that must be acted upon by the House) within the constitutionally required three session days of receipt of the complaints. After this, the House within 10 session days is required to refer these to the Committee on Justice to determine if these are valid impeachment complaints, to be transmitted, after a plenary vote supporting it, to the Senate for trial. The Constitution specified that this evaluation must be done within 60 session days.
Order
Romualdez didn’t act on even the very first required step of putting it in the House’s Order of Business three days after he received the complaints. He even pretended he was not aware of these complaints, and his aide Velasco, to support this lie, told the media he had not transmitted this to him as he “needed to talk to other congressmen.” But the Constitution clearly did not give the secretary-general — a glorified clerk and not a congressman — such discretion.
But it turned out that Velasco was lying: If he didn’t transmit it to Romualdez, how on earth were these acknowledged as verified complaints in the House’s Feb. 5 session, in which these were voted on to be “archived.”
Romualdez invented the term “archived”: the Constitution does not provide for a compliant to be “archived.” Complaints after that 60 session days of being presented to plenary by the Committee on Justice must either be dismissed, or ruled valid, to be transmitted to the Senate.
“You don’t fool us, you nincompoops,” the high court effectively said, saying that by not acting at all on the three impeachment complaints, the House in effect dismissed them, triggering the one-year ban on a new impeachment complaint.
Failure
Romualdez’s failure to refer the complaints to the Committee on Justice, and to comply with the other steps required by the Constitution, in effect completed the process of the three complaints’ “initiation,” triggering the one-year ban on the fourth to be tried by an impeachment court.
The court was actually adhering to that legal principle “What cannot be done directly by law cannot be done indirectly through any device or scheme.” This principle bars evasive maneuvers that defeat the spirit or intent of the Constitution or a statute.
This doctrine has been repeatedly applied by the Supreme Court. Such cases include Sinco v. Comelec, 103 Phil. 1141 (1958): “The law does not tolerate doing indirectly what it prohibits to be done directly”; and Callejo v. Ombudsman, GR 171673 (March 18, 2010): “What cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. To allow this would be to encourage circumvention of legal prohibitions through legal technicalities.”
Technicalities? Other than the fact that the legal system is really a body of technicalities, these actually operationalize the spirit of the one-per-year-impeachment-ban, which is to ensure that impeachable officers are not harassed and that the performance of their duties to the country suffers.
An impeachable officer would certainly be harassed if impeachment complaints are filed in a series and so often, yet these are not acted upon by the Speaker. The important time period the Constitution specifies is the 60 session days within which the committee, after hearings, submits its report to the House for a resolution, either to dismiss it or to ask the Senate to convene the impeachment trial.
Sixty
The 60 session days could actually last from six to even eight calendar months. While the three impeachment complaints were filed almost consecutively (Dec. 2, 4 and 19), an unscrupulous opposition could paralyze the president or vice president by filing complaints two or three months apart so that the official has a Damocles sword hanging over his head for as long as two years. The impeached high official, I can imagine, could even be dragged into corruption, as he would have to raise money to pay for his or her lawyers.
I can’t say if Romualdez and Velasco’s fiasco was due to their ignorance of the procedures for impeachment (although Romualdez is a lawyer), or they foolishly, wrongly thought that by not acting on the three complaints this would prevent these from being considered as having been initiated, as defined by the Constitution, triggering the one-year ban.
The wisdom of the Constitution framers is that by requiring fixed periods for each of the steps to be completed by the House, the opposition would not be able to drag for many months an impeachment complaint, transforming the powerful impeachment process as a weapon against an impeachable official.
What’s despicable though is that Romualdez — and many commentators — are trying to cover up his blunder by claiming that all 13 of the Supreme Court justices who struck down the impeachment don’t know their law, or as that funny-looking Marcos official Larry Gadon claimed, the Supreme Court justices are running dogs of the Dutertes.
Romualdez can only blame himself, as well as the communist fronts and crackpots pretending to be champions of the Constitution, whose agenda is only to prevent Sara from running for president in 2028.
It’s now strike two for Romualdez: he bungled last year the Marcos-Romualdez gang’s first plan to take down the vice president by amending the Constitution to change our system into a unicameral parliament, through the ridiculous Pirma signature campaign.
It’s time for his puppet master to fire this bungling operator.
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Blunderer Romualdez should blame himself, not the Supreme Court
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