Marcos’ remove-Sara project turns to a subtraction strategyMarcos’ remove-Sara project turns to a subtraction strategy

WAKE up, folks. What we are seeing now can’t be trivialized, much less ridiculed — as Marcos’ commentariat corps have been doing — as the “Senate circus,” “zarzuela” and “telenovela.” What is happening is as serious as can be for the Republic: This president is on an all-out siege of a supposedly independent branch of government, the Senate, considered as the last bastion of a democracy, in order to continue in power in 2028.

President Marcos’ media minions have also adopted a propaganda tack of portraying the 13 independent senators — especially Senate President Alan Cayetano — as degrading that body, rather than defenders of it.

“Bilog ang mundo” is certainly a Filipino understatement to describe that even Cory Aquino’s prime mouthpieces 40 years ago — the likes of the Monsod couple and her favorite Senate president Franklin Drilon who have spent their lives condemning the dictator Marcos — have been dragged from retirement to be bashers of the rebellious 13. I doubt if Lorna Kapunan, said to be one of the country’s most expensive lawyers, is appearing in TV talks shows to criticize the new Senate leadership pro bono. Why, this is the first time she is dabbling in politics.

President Marcos has pulled out all the stops for the conviction in the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte, in order to prevent her from running for the presidency in 2028. After all, he sees an existential threat, and he is now extremely paranoid that the Dutertes in power will be as ruthless as he has been to them.

We can hardly see and hear the clash of this epochal battle, because it has boiled down to a quiet arithmetic, which is really the very mundane basis of the lofty democratic concept.

Counting

Forget the speeches, the articles of impeachment, the televised drama of a trial set to open in July. An impeachment is a counting problem, and the Marcos administration has worked out that it cannot win the count the honest way. It thought it would be as easy as in the case of the late chief justice Renato Corona, who was buried in tons of fake information and pork-barrel type funds given to the 20 senators who voted him guilty.

Marcos, however, forgets that Corona was never an elected official, but an appointee of President Arroyo who at that time suffered from the most intense black propaganda by the Yellows. In contrast, Sara was voted as vice president by 32 million Filipinos, and is at present by far the most trusted and popular public official.

It had become obvious that the Marcos camp cannot get the 16 senators — two-thirds of 24 — needed to convict her. So, it has stopped trying to add votes to its column. It has begun, instead, to subtract them from hers.

Look at where the chamber stood only weeks ago. When Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano captured the Senate presidency in May, he did it with 13 votes — a Duterte-leaning majority. On that math, the vice president is not in danger; she is safe with room to spare, because acquittal requires only nine senators willing to withhold a guilty verdict.

For a president who needs her permanently disqualified before the 2028 race, and whose own approval has collapsed to record lows, those 13 are an intolerable obstacle. He cannot persuade them. He cannot buy them as they know the voters that Sara can call to action, millions of supporters that a P100-million campaign chest can’t buy.

Strategy

So, the strategy became darker but bolder: remove them from the Senate itself one by one, until the obstacle is small enough to overcome — two or three senators who could be offered billions of pesos, which I think the ghost flood control scam has already raised.

The removals are already under way, and they are not subtle once you know to watch for them. Sen. Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, one of the 13, is in hiding — a fugitive under an International Criminal Court warrant, unable to appear, unable even to take his oath as a senator-judge. A senator who cannot enter the chamber cannot cast a vote to acquit. One down.

Then came Sen. Jinggoy Estrada. He surrendered the other day to a nonbailable plunder charge tied to the flood control kickbacks, and he is jailed — in the Quezon City jail for Chrissake — for as long as the trial takes, which could be years. On his way out of the Senate he said plainly what he believed was happening: that he was being punished for the camp he had chosen, and that he had earlier been pressured to cross into the minority so the cases against him might quietly disappear. Two down.

The timing speaks for itself, as dela Rosa and Estrada’s arrests were made just weeks after the House of Representatives approved and transmitted the articles of impeachment to the Senate, which set the trial to start July 6.

The third name is the one the whole design is bending toward. Sen. Christopher “Bong” Go was named by the ICC prosecution as an alleged co-perpetrator in Rodrigo Duterte’s crimes-against-humanity case — the same file that took down the former president and that hangs over dela Rosa. No warrant against Go has yet been confirmed. But the apparatus that conjured one for dela Rosa can plainly conjure another, and the political incentive is identical. Should Go be surrendered to The Hague, or hounded into the same exile that swallowed his colleague, a third anti-conviction vote vanishes from the chamber. Three of the 13, gone — and the comfortable Duterte majority dissolves with them.

Arithmetic

Now the arithmetic the administration is counting on comes into clear view. Strip those three from the board and the Senate splits down the middle: roughly 11 senators (if the Go scenario doesn’t happen) in an independent or Duterte-leaning bloc against 11 aligned with Malacañang.

A deadlock — but a deadlock is not what a determined president settles for. He needs only to pry loose a single senator from the independent 11 to make himself the majority. And prying loose one senator is the most familiar maneuver in Philippine politics. There is always a price. A committee chairmanship, a long-frozen project suddenly funded, one or more relatives appointed to juicy posts, a troublesome case made to evaporate — and when none of the genteel currencies suffice, the blunt one. The cost of one defector, set beside the prize of erasing the leading contender for 2028, is trivial.

In Corona’s impeachment, President Benigno Aquino III raised half a billion pesos in pork-barrel type funds to bribe 20 senators P50 to P100 million each. Sen. Jinggoy Estrada would later allege that senators were handed an additional P50 million each after the verdict; the budget department insisted the money was legitimate funding for projects the senators themselves had requested, not payment for a vote. With 11 senators in his pocket now, the cost for the additional five senators will even be cheaper — P250 million — than that P500 million Aquino spent to remove Corona.

Also with just one defection, 11 Marcos minions becomes 12, and 12 is a majority. And a majority, in an impeachment court, is not just a bloc of votes — it is the hand that writes the rules of the trial.

The majority decides whether senators who are absent — jailed, fugitive, in hiding — may still vote remotely or by proxy. And the simplest way to keep the Duterte-aligned absentees out of the count is to decline, deliberately, to amend the rules that would let them in. Leave de la Rosa unable to vote. Leave Estrada locked out. Leave any future absentee silenced. The majority does not need to expel them; it needs only to refuse them a path back to the ballot.

Trap

And here the trap is being set. The Constitution demands two-thirds — but two-thirds of what? If the threshold floats with the membership actually able to vote, then every senator removed from the count lowers the bar to convict. Shrink the voting chamber from 24 toward 21, and two-thirds slides from 16 down toward 14.

Suddenly the 12 who form the majority need find only two more guilty votes to reach it. Twelve plus two. That is the whole game. A supermajority the framers built as a near-impossible safeguard — a number no faction was ever supposed to be able to assemble alone — is quietly converted into a bare majority plus a couple of borrowed votes, all by controlling who is permitted to be counted in the first place.

And whatever one thinks of the Dutertes, the precedent should frighten everyone. A Senate whose membership can be thinned by selective prosecution and an obliging international court, whose conviction threshold drifts downward with every empty chair, whose majority writes the rules to lock out the inconvenient — that is a Senate in which any president with control of the prosecutors and the rules committee can remove any official he fears.

And of course, the most terrible consequence of all: Filipinos will be prevented from voting the president they overwhelmingly want. We’ll have a dictatorship.

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Marcos’ remove-Sara project turns to a subtraction strategyMarcos’ remove-Sara project turns to a subtraction strategy
Source: Breaking News PH