Why Marcos impeachment project is doomed

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THE impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte is rapidly becoming President Marcos’ biggest, and most costly misadventure.

Twenty trial days have already been consumed, and all the Senate prosecutors have done may be summed up in Sen. Risa Hontiveros’ favorite word: “pinahihiwatig.” The term translates to English as “hint,” “insinuate,” or “imply.” As in Hontiveros’ claim that certain Commission on Audit documents hint, insinuate, or imply the Office of the Vice President’s misuse of funds.

Nobody is convicted either in regular courts or in this special impeachment court for claims that imply, insinuate or hint at a crime. The basic rule of law is that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty. The stupid belief of Marcos’ boys and girls is that Sara is guilty until proven innocent. One anti-Sara senator, a college drop-out, resorted to calling a witness ”’tupid,” while an expensive, over-the-hump private lady prosecutor resorted to sloganeering.

The prosecution could only present such really useless witnesses as NBI Director Melvin Matibag, appointed from nowhere to the post in February to provide hearsay testimony against Sara; another agency employee pretending to be a digital forensic expert attesting to the authenticity of a video recording; and a staff member of the Office of the Vice President who couldn’t be intimidated into stating that confidential funds released to their office had been absconded.

The “testimonies” — one hesitates to even call them that — produced by the prosecutors are a far, far cry from those in President Joseph Estrada’s impeachment trial — such as those by the whistleblower governor Chavit Singson; Estrada’s finance secretary Edgardo Espiritu; SEC head Perfecto Yasay; and two bank executives, lawyer Manuel Curato and senior vice president Clarissa Ocampo, who were actual witnesses to the ousted president’s commission of crimes.

Sara’s impeachment has been President Marcos Jr.’s overarching project to prevent her from coming to power in 2028, as all polls show her to have a commanding lead. He has to realize that for various reasons, his project is now doomed.

Presidential candidate Jojo Binay’s case — his fall from being the No. 1 contender in the 2022 elections after relentless media battering — cannot be compared to Sara’s. Binay didn’t have Sara’s charisma, nor did he have her solid political base with her almost total support from Mindanao, which accounts for 25 percent of votes in a presidential election.

Timing

Timing alone has doomed Marcos’ project. For various reasons, Marcos’ project was delayed for nearly two years, reckoning from the day the plot was given the go-signal in mid-2024.

Impeachment is essentially a political project, disguised as a legal process, and it is the political landscape that will determine its outcome. When President Aquino III launched his project to remove Chief Justice Renato Corona in 2011, he was just in the first quarter of his term, one fourth of the way through his presidency. Sara’s trial began in the last third of Marcos’ term. He doesn’t realize he’s now a lame-duck president, which means his influence over the senator-judges has drastically weakened because he is on the way out.

When Aquino III moved against Corona, he was riding his post-2010 election popularity and mandate, in a classic use of honeymoon capital. In contrast, Marcos is deep into his divorce with the nation. In fact, most Filipinos now want him out for his incompetence and his administration’s massive corruption. This is a late-term, adversarial combat between a lame-duck president and a vice president rising in the political firmament.

Corona was also extremely vulnerable to the Yellows’ assault. He was a Supreme Court chief justice — really a cloistered job — and not a politician, and therefore had zero political support. He was identified with President Macapagal Arroyo, who appointed him just a month and a half before her term ended, and therefore was viewed as a “midnight appointee.”

Opinion

Arroyo also had become unpopular because she had turned against the Yellows and during the closing years of her presidency, the Philippines was hit severely by the global financial crisis. Public opinion was not behind Corona. The Aquino camp only had to manufacture some fake “evidence” — such as Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales and COA auditor Heidi Mendoza’s deliberate distortion of the magnitude of his dollar savings — as a smokescreen for the senators to vote Corona guilty.

Sara, in contrast, is a popular politician with an unprecedented 62 percent of voters putting her in her post — the highest percentage of votes cast for the vice presidency ever. Despite the massive propaganda machinery that has been brought against her, she remains very popular, with both Pulse Asia and the Social Weather Stations’ polls reporting 57–58 percent trust ratings.

She not only has the Duterte brand but also has her own personal charisma, the capacity to generate emotional identification with a mass audience, which historical precedents show can vanish only after many decades. That charisma is such a politically powerful feature for a politician can be appreciated by the fact that it originated from the Greek kharisma — in early Christianity, meaning a divinely bestowed gift.

Corona’s impeachment happened early in Aquino’s term, giving 20 senators who voted to remove him much time to benefit from that president’s reward — such as the P150 million in pork-barrel type of funds — for supporting his project while suffering no political cost.

In contrast, Sara’s conviction would leave only about a year and a half in the remainder of Marcos’ term for the senators who vote to remove her to benefit from Marcos’ payoffs. Worse, because of the ghost flood control funds controversy, the public — aided by the opposition — will be intensely scrutinizing funds allocated to the senators, which would make it difficult for Marcos to bribe senators with as much funds as Aquino did in 2012. The political calculus for voting Sara guilty is clearly a high-risk move (facing Sara supporters’ wrath) with little benefit.

Arithmetic

Sheer arithmetic points to Sara’s acquittal. The Constitution requires 16 of the 24 senators to convict her. This means Sara does not have to command a Senate majority. She needs only nine senators to be acquitted.

She appears to have more than that already. The five solid anti-conviction votes are Bato dela Rosa, Bong Go, Rodante Marcoleta, Imee Marcos and Robin Padilla.

Another six are likely — almost definitely, many say — to acquit her: Alan Peter Cayetano, Pia Cayetano, Loren Legarda, Mark Villar, Camille Villar, and Jinggoy Estrada, who has been jailed on plunder charges by the Marcos government. Their political histories and, more importantly, their conduct and alignments during the impeachment proceedings make them considerably more likely to acquit than convict.

That gives Sara 11 votes that are likely to acquit her — two more than the nine she needs.

Then, there are senators whose terms expire in 2028, such as Francis Escudero and JV Ejercito. These two have not shown themselves to be rabid anti-Sara judges, and therefore have the leeway to vote for acquittal, calculating that they cannot risk losing the huge bloc of voters that are Sara’s supporters.

Add these two to the 11 I have identified above as likely to acquit Sara, and there would be a majority of 13 judges acquitting her. Lacson, Lapid and Sotto could even abstain as a sop to Marcos, yet not angering Sara, which would allow them to have some link to the new president.

Loyalists

Those voting to remove Sara will be a small gang of seven diehard Marcos loyalists: the three Yellow senators (Bam Aquino, Risa Hontiveros and Kiko Pangilinan); the two Tulfos; the always-bewildered Juan Miguel Zubiri; and Senate President Win Gatchalian, whose father, William, needs Marcos’ support of his businesses’ problems.

But then William doesn’t really care about politics. If he realized that the numbers are for Sara and that she would likely be president in 2028, he would order his son to back her for the sake of his businesses’ future. Win would even like that, as he could portray himself as being a man of principle, that he is not a minion of Marcos, who, after all, is hated by most Filipinos.

Not even print media sated with Marcos’ bribes can reverse this calculation, unless this administration produces some damning, spectacular testimonies against her at the level of those made against Estrada.

For fun, I asked six artificial-intelligence assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Venice, Kimi and Grok — to provide me with their evaluations, and all had conclusions like mine. One even pointed out that traders in the Polymarket — the world’s largest prediction market platform — currently assign a 65 percent probability for Sara’s acquittal.

Watch how the House representatives that Marcos has put at the frontline of this impeachment brouhaha — like Joel Chua, Gerville Luistro, Chel Diokno, Terry Ridon and Leila de Lima — one by one become invisible.

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Why Marcos impeachment project is doomed
Source: Breaking News PH