How the hell could Romualdez fool so many people?
IT amazes me that House Speaker Martin Romualdez got to fool a lot of people that the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte was, as he claimed, about “accountability.” Indeed, this lie has been raised ad nauseam in so many arguments, columns and splashed in many placards by demonstrators.
Senate President Francis Escudero — an ally of President Marcos — tore down this fabrication during the Senate voting that affirmed the Supreme Court ruling that the impeachment was illegal with one rhetorical question: “Are you truly for accountability, or simply anti Duterte?” In a similar vein, Sen. Alan Cayetano sarcastically said: “Impeachment shouldn’t be used just because political rivals are at odds. If you don’t want Vice President Sara to become president — just beat her in 2028.”
I was pleasantly surprised that the truth — only because it was his UP colleague Marvic Leonen who authored the decision — has dawned on Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist Randy David, who had been pushing for Sara’s impeachment in his columns, even claiming that her “attitude affirmed her guilt. However, he does not get to admit this himself, and relies on a quote he attributed to Leonen: “When impeachment is weaponized for personal gain or political retaliation, it undermines its legitimacy.”
Any rational observer knew from the start of this episode that Romualdez had weaponized the impeachment process and that it was entirely an operation to take out Sara who, at this point, is the shoo-in for the presidency in the 2028 elections.
The Inquirer and Star editors and opinion writers and so-called legal luminaries — especially Christian Monsod, Antonio Carpio and Adolf Azcuna — who strived to disguise this weaponization as a legitimate constitutional process for accountability, acted as Goebbels for Romualdez’s abomination. They never even mentioned in all their blah-blahs that the impeachment complaint got to be signed by 215 congressmen only because the House speaker bribed them, with our money. Instead, they constructed a narrative that it was about “accountability.”
Immune
If they really thought Sara was guilty of crimes, why didn’t they file criminal cases, as the vice president position isn’t immune to suits? But then there is absolutely nothing in all four complaints that could stand up in court. And even if they did, it wouldn’t immediately ban her from running for office in 2028, as an appeal procedure could take years.
Those who shrieked to get the trial started “forthwith,” other than the shameless political mercenaries, either had minds that are so feeble they are easily manipulated by the Marcos-Romualdez propaganda apparatus, or they have deceived themselves into claiming all sorts of justification for the impeachment. Underlying all their rarefied talk about public officials’ accountability was their hatred of former president Rodrigo Duterte and their thinking that Sara would be her father’s daughter and had to be stopped from becoming president in 2028.
History repeated itself: It is the same gang with the same flawed ideology — the NGOs and party-lists of the Communist Party, Risa Hontiveros and her personal party Akbayan, the communist organizations, self-righteous civil society groups, Inquirer and Star editors and columnists including David, leftist clergy groups, and retired Supreme Court justices — that constituted the propaganda apparatus for the very unjust removal of Chief Justice Renato Corona in 2012 through impeachment.
In that case, it was, to use Leonen’s words, “for personal gain.” It was a plot by the then-ruling Aquino-Cojuangco clan to get billions of pesos more for the expropriation of its Hacienda Luisita, which Corona resisted. The Yellows also feared that Corona — who had been appointed chief justice by President Arroyo in 2001 — would block their persecution of Arroyo, who was at that time the equivalent of Duterte. Indeed, they succeeded. Chief Justice Lourdes Serano — whom Aquino III handpicked for the post in August 2024 — sat on Arroyo’s case that the latter spent five years in detention, to be released only when Duterte assumed power in 2016.
Red flag
The very red flag about the impeachment, which was so plain to see, would be a question:
“When did Romualdez, the Marcoses, and the 67 congressmen like Rodge Rodriguez, Edwin Gardiola, and Zaldy Co, with huge government contracts and who were at the forefront of the impeachment plot, ever have an interest in ‘accountability’?” Since when have they ever expressed the slightest concern to fight corruption in government? In fact, I have never heard Romualdez utter the word “corruption” as if he feared that people would express a doubting grin, or even laugh wholeheartedly.
Marcos and Romualdez’s nearly criminal total indifference to issues of accountability has become stark in the fact that even with the total failure of 5,500 flood-control projects costing tens of billions of pesos, which the President had boasted about, they haven’t called for an investigation.
Corruption is so pervasive in our country; it is an open secret that all but a few PNP and AFP generals, governors and mayors, department heads, and heads of revenue-collecting agencies (Customs and BIR) in this country miraculously retire very, very rich, with a net worth a thousand times bigger than their incomes in government.
This country is crying out for an all-out war against corruption, on the same scale and intensity as President Duterte’s war on drugs, or what China did only in the past two decades, what Singapore and Hong Kong did in the 1970s — which was a big factor for their economic growth.
What?
But what do the president and his cousin, the speaker, do?
They undertake an operation to impeach Vice President Sara Duterte on such grounds as failure to disclose her confidential funds (which all government units do not disclose, which is the reason these are called “confidential”); her “failure to oppose China’s aggression in the West Philippine Sea”; and “extrajudicial killings when she was Davao City mayor” — confusing her with her father. The third impeachment complaint simply referred to “the hearings conducted by the House committee on good government and public accountability” — despite the fact that that committee had not even written its findings.
Anybody who reads the first three complaints would conclude that these are all hastily written, sloppy complaints most probably made overnight. Why did the Romualdez gang do this?
First, it was in order to portray Sara as so corrupt that four different complaints were made, with the first three complaints filed by do-gooder civil society activists, including religious and former government figures such as Teresita Quintos Deles, and communist fronts. They served to give the dark plot a veneer of respectability, which it would have totally none if the only ones pushing for Sara’s impeachment were Romualdez and the 214 congressmen — who collectively have the reputation of being corrupt.
The strategy was also to kill her politically “by a thousand cuts,” in case she survived the trial.
Binay
An example of such a strategy was what happened to presidential candidate Jojo Binay in the 2016 elections. The Liberal Party and the Yellow Horde hurled so many corruption allegations against Binay — at that time the shoo-in for the presidency in the 2016 elections. Even if all these accusations were proven false — his ratings still fell from 40 percent in April 2014 to 18 percent by September 2015 — he didn’t recover from that level, losing in the 2016 presidential elections.
Second, the Marcos-Romualdez gang borrowed from the playbook of the Corona impeachment that one of the four counts of the four impeachment complaints would get so much media and emotional mileage that the senators would be persuaded to find Sara guilty. Corona was impeached not because of hidden wealth, nor because of his many alleged properties, nor because of misuse of funds of the Supreme Court.
After being given the incentive of allocating P150 million for each senator to be used at their direction, 21 senators found Corona guilty because he didn’t report his dollar accounts in his statement of assets, liabilities and net worth. Never mind that whether this is required is debatable since such accounts are covered by the bank secrecy law. It wasn’t even a felony, and the law that made this mandatory merely required the erring official to correct his SALN.
Romualdez’s gang calculated that, with similar hundreds of millions of reasons thrown in as in the Corona case, the senators would find a similar one case to justify their decision to find Sara guilty, the penalty for which would be to bar her from holding any public office, clearing the way for this greedy clan to hold on to power beyond 2028.
It is certainly a case of poetic justice that it was Romualdez’s strategy of having four complaints filed that made the Supreme Court rule the fourth impeachment he crafted as violative of the constitutional ban that only one complaint against the same official can be made each year.
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The post How the hell could Romualdez fool so many people? first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.
How the hell could Romualdez fool so many people?
Source: Breaking News PH
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