Impeachment court: A kangaroo court

WHILE Marcos’ minions in the Senate are ecstatic over having succeeded in reducing the number of votes required to convict Vice President Sara Duterte, this attack on the Constitution has only revealed the real nature of this impeachment court. Because Marcos’ supporters control the Senate, being the majority, they have made it not a court that is checking the alleged abuses of a high official but a kangaroo court to politically assassinate Marcos’ nemesis.

It has become not a tribunal for determining whether Sara Duterte has committed “high crimes” making her unfit for public office but merely a theater, a moro-moro, to stop the vice president from being elected to the presidency in 2028.

After 30 days during which all the prosecution could prove was that at worst, the vice president’s office had not strictly followed government disbursement procedures, Marcos’ minions have resorted to a desperate move: Reduce the number of votes to convict her from 16 to 14.

Their plot is as follows. Assume that Marcos has 13 senators who voted to lower the threshold as those who would vote to convict Sara. Marcos now needs only one more senator at whom to throw a billion pesos or even billions for him to evade prison, and his family’s total political and even financial catastrophe, which he sees to be inevitable if Sara becomes president in 2028.

If Marcos and his political assassins from the House of Representatives are confident that Sara had committed high crimes for which the Constitution required she be removed as vice president, why did the required vote count need to be reduced? Indeed, in the late Chief Justice Renato Corona’s impeachment trial, there was absolutely no proposal to reduce the denominator from 24 to 23, to take into account that there was a vacancy, due to then-senator Benigno Aquino III’s election to the presidency.

It was a necessary element of the plot to take out Sara to reduce the number of senators whose votes would be counted. The government implemented the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant on Sen. Ronald dela Rosa on May 11. The Senate as an impeachment court was organized on May 18. Sen. Jinggoy Estrada was arrested and jailed on June 10. The Justice department filed plunder charges against Sen. Rodante Marcoleta on July 3, and he was promptly arrested on July 6. The Ombudsman, whose jurisdiction is solely over government officials’ crimes, filed charges last week against Senators Mark and Camille Villar for being directors in a water company long before they became senators. To make sure the number of senators voting to acquit Sara is reduced, the Marcos regime has been working on filing charges against Senators Alan Peter Cayetano and Robinhood Padilla, and getting the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant against Bong Go.

Appalling

I find it so appalling that even supposedly thinking columnists and editors find nothing wrong with these Marcos moves, subscribing to Marcos supporter Rep. Robert Barbers’ idiotic claim that these are “coincidental.”

Changing the threshold before the evidence was even complete produces exactly the appearance a kangaroo court is known for: a tribunal less interested in whether the accused is guilty than in adjusting the machinery so a result is easier to reach.

That suspicion sharpens because the text is not ambiguous. Article XI, Section 3(6) requires “the concurrence of two-thirds of all the Members of the Senate” — not two-thirds of those present, those voting, or those the court deems capable. “All” is doing real work, and the American contrast makes the majority’s reading harder to defend: the US Constitution requires “two-thirds of the Members present.” Had our framers wanted that rule, they knew the words for it.

What the majority has effectively done is rewrite “all the Members” into “all the members legally and factually capable of participating.” Those words appear nowhere in the Constitution — getting them there requires the kind of casuistry Marcos ally Sen. Erwin Tulfo deployed to argue the denominator down from 24 to 20. Detention does not abolish a seat. Illness does not create a vacancy. Absence does not amend the Charter. The earliest Philippine draft could have kept the American formula; the finished Constitution deliberately discarded it. That is not a technicality — it is the choice the framers made, in plain sight.

The majority’s defenders say they were only solving a practical problem: Several senators may be unable to sit when judgment is rendered, and empty chairs should not count toward acquittal. But in this age of technology, there is no barrier for a senator to register his vote, even if he is on the other side of the globe.

Interpretation

It also asks the Senate to fix by interpretation something the Constitution already fixed by text. The framers could have written “members present.” They didn’t. If the safeguard shrinks every time a senator is detained, ill or absent, circumstances outside the merits decide how hard it is to remove an official — and the logic cuts both ways politically. A future president’s opponents could be arrested or incapacitated on the eve of judgment, shrinking the denominator along with their votes. A safeguard whose strength depends on who is unavailable that week is not a safeguard.

There is a bitter irony the majority seems not to have noticed: a shrinking denominator cuts both ways. At 24 members, 16 votes convict and nine votes against are enough to block it. At 20, only 14 convict — but only seven would be needed to block that lower number, too. The prosecution’s hurdle drops by two; but so does the number of senators who can stop it. The maneuver may not even deliver the result its architects assumed. By my count, six senators are 99 percent likely to acquit Sara: Robinhood Padilla, Bong Go, Imee Marcos, Jinggoy Esrtrada, Camille Villar and Alan Cayetano. Only one more senator is needed to acquit Sara, and this could be Francis Escudero (who voted against the lowering of the threshold), Mark Villar (despite the mystery about why he voted to reduce it) or even JV Ejercito.

More consequential still: Sara would likely ask the Supreme Court to rule on a patently constitutional issue. This would delay the trial: How can it proceed if there is no Supreme Court ruling on how many senators are needed to convict or acquit Sara? Marcos’ plot to remove Sara will lose steam, his minions getting tired of it and the public uninterested.

Ironically, the Marcos minions’ success in lowering the threshold has backfired. It has resulted in public outrage — so palpable in social media — over their message of changing the rules of the game in mid-game and tampering with the Constitution just to convict Sara. This has drowned the ridiculous intellectual masturbation by the likes of Tulfo, that it is merely a practical move to reflect the current circumstances. But these “circumstances” — the jailing of two senators, the threat of the same against others, the enforcement of an arrest warrant by an illegal court — are clearly essential elements of the plot against Sara.

Marcos Jr. has missed the real reason his father was toppled by “People Power.” It wasn’t because of atrocities during his regime or his kleptocracy. It was the perception that he prevented Filipinos from making Cory Aquino their president by tampering with the counting of votes in the Feb. 8 “snap elections.”

This realization among Filipinos has been getting stronger: The impeachment is not about accountability of high officials, it is simply and totally Marcos’ bid to prevent his nemesis, Sara, daughter of the Duterte he shanghaied to a foreign land to die, from becoming president in 2028.

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Impeachment court: A kangaroo court
Source: Breaking News PH