Martial law then, impeachment now/Ninoy then, Sara now

THE impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte is neither a project to cleanse the government of corruption nor is it a partisan brawl. It has become a struggle for democracy itself, to prevent the Marcos family from thwarting the will of the people, from choosing their president in 2028.

The case against Sara is the most brazen use of constitutional processes as political weapons. It echoes in disturbing detail the way his father weaponized the Constitution half a century ago to cling to power for 13 years.

In 1972, Marcos Sr. was a year from ending his third term, with the Constitution barring him from a fourth term. His archenemy, the fiery opposition leader senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. was inarguably a shoo-in to become president in the 1974 elections. Marcos, however, exploited the martial‑law clause of the 1935 Constitution — intended for genuine emergencies like invasion or rebellion — and bent it into a blanket license for dictatorship.

He then crafted a new Constitution, which was ratified through fake referendum to be the 1973 Constitution. Its Section 3 of Article XVII stated that Marcos would continue to exercise all his powers under both the 1935 Constitution and the new Constitution until an Interim National Assembly was convened, and a prime minister and regular government were established.

This Assembly though was never convened. Instead, Marcos suspended its convening on the very day the Constitution took effect, allowing him to continue ruling under the Constitution’s transitory provisions until it was replaced by the Interim Batasang Pambansa in 1976, which first met in June 1978. This was packed though with his officials and provincial kingpins which did his bidding to declare him president and Finance Minister Cesar Virata as prime minister.

Today, Marcos Jr. is mimicking his father using a different provision: He has turned the impeachment mechanism of the 1987 Constitution into a weapon for erasing a rival successor and then amending the Charter to allow him to wield essentially the same presidential power. Marcos Jr. also learned from this father how a legislative body can be controlled for his purposes. Martial law then, impeachment now. Ninoy then, Sara now.

Restraint

In both cases, the Constitution is not a restraint but a weapon. This impeachment is Marcos Jr.’s martial law without the name. His father had to prevent Ninoy from becoming president in the 1974 elections. Now the son cannot allow Sara to become president in 2028.

Marcos Jr. is following his father’s playbook. Where his father twisted the emergency powers provision, he is twisting the accountability mechanism. Impeachment was meant to be a last‑resort response to extraordinary wrongdoing by top officials. Under Marcos Jr., it has become a first‑resort instrument of demolition, for politically assassinating the presidential candidate likely to succeed him.

History is repeating itself right before our eyes. There is a sordid change from the 1970s, though. Then the Reds and the Ninoy followers that would later on become the Yellows fought Marcos, either through arms or through propaganda, and thousands of them were killed or incarcerated.

Now, the Reds, the Yellows and the Pinks are Marcos Jr.’s cadres in undertaking propaganda and wielding the impeachment weapons to politically murder Sara. The Left organizations that emerged in the anti-Marcos struggle — Gabriela, Kabataan, Akbayan and other Makabayan bloc members — have been in the forefront in the prosecution of Sara. The high-profile personification of this sickening capitulation is Jose Manuel “Chel” Diokno, one of the principal House prosecutors. Not only was he a “human rights” lawyer — the alias for lawyers the Communist Party mobilizes to provide legal service for its cadres and guerrillas captured by the military. He is the only son of a hero of the anti-dictatorship movement in the 1970s and 1980s, the revered Jose Diokno.

Propaganda

Step back from the massive propaganda noise of the Reds, the Yellows and the Pinks, which are magnified by the mercenary media and Marcos-controlled newspapers, and it is so clear that Sara is essentially today’s incarnation of Ninoy — obstacles to Marcos dictatorships.

Under the 1987 Constitution, the vice presidency is institutionally marginal, a conditional post that is the replacement for an incapacitated president. The vice president has no command over the armed forces or the bureaucracy, no direct control over fiscal policy or foreign affairs, no access really to government funds or largesse that could be converted into bribes. Here and in the US, from which we have patterned our presidential system, the vice president only gains real influence if the president delegates some power to him or her. This is why the US has had 49 vice presidents in its history, with not a single one being impeached.

If governance were the true concern, Congress would be investigating this administration’s economic management, its handling of food and energy issues, foreign‑policy missteps, and especially the gargantuan ghost flood control scam. Instead, the House has devoted months of hearings and livestreamed inquisitions to impeaching a vice president who does not run the government, and whose office has been reduced to symbolic presence.

The charges against Duterte — misuse of confidential funds, unexplained wealth and lurid allegations that she threatened to assassinate the president and his family — have provided sensational material for Congress and media. The House justice committee found “probable cause.” The plenary produced a lopsided vote: 257 out of 318 members endorsed impeachment — another testament to the power of an immoral presidency more than willing to bribe legislators with pork-barrel type of funds, positions for whoever they want, or threats to be investigated and charged by agencies Marcos controls.

Madness

To fall for the propaganda that this is a moral crusade against corruption, for government officials’ accountability is at best madness, and at worse hypocrisy of the worst kind.

The only rational explanation for the vice president to be impeached is that for an administration already beset by an increasingly fragmented coalition, gross mismanagement of the economy, the horrid exposés of plunder of funds intended for flood control, the steep drop of his satisfaction ratings according to all polls, the prospect Sara becoming president is for Marcos an existential threat. Furthermore, just a year and half to the end of his term, Marcos has not been able to create a proxy to beat Sara.

From that vantage point, Sara’s impeachment is not about punishing alleged crimes; it is about using the single constitutional sanction that matters in 2028: removal from office coupled with perpetual disqualification from holding any public position.

We have seen impeachment weaponized before, with different motives.

In 2000, President Joseph Estrada’s impeachment emerged from a convergence of business, Church, media and political elites alarmed by flagrant corruption and cronyism. The jueteng collections alleged by none other than a former ally, the unearthing of his bank account under the fictitious name Jose Velarde, the exposé that he got P3 billion in bribes to facilitate the purchase of the telecom monopoly to a foreign-owned conglomerate — to name just three of the allegations against him — were clear, evidence-based instances of the worst kind of corruption by the highest official of the land.

Precedent

There had been no impeachments before Estrada. His impeachment created a precedent that what before was thought to be a grueling project to undertake and only as a last-resort mechanism to immediately remove a corrupt high official — instead of just waiting for his term to end — can be accomplished in a short period of time that it was merely a brief disturbance in the body politic.

President Benigno Aquino III therefore had Chief Justice Renato Corona impeached. He wanted to reverse an unfavorable Supreme Court decision on Hacienda Luisita and to install a chief justice under his thumb. Corona was innocent, convicted because of massive black propaganda by the Yellow media and by Aquino’s bribing of the 20 senators with at least P100 million in pork barrel-type funds.

Corona’s impeachment was a more dangerous precedent than Estrada’s: that this constitutional process can be used by a sitting president for his darkest ulterior motives, even without the kind of blatant corruption that justified Estrada’s impeachment. If Aquino III could remove a chief justice through impeachment, Marcos now thinks he can also use this mechanism to prevent Sara from becoming the next president, and with her out of the way to amend the Constitution to allow him to continue in power, just as his father did.

As the philosopher George Santayana warned, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If Filipinos refuse to study the lessons of our own history, we will be condemned not just to repeat it, but to live permanently under its darkest patterns.

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Martial law then, impeachment now/Ninoy then, Sara now
Source: Breaking News PH