The impeachment train has cranked up its engine once again, ready to roll, and raring to roadshow the trial of Sara Duterte on whether she should stay as the country’s second highest official. It promises to be the mother of all political soap operas, and is expected to provide the climax to the dynasty war between the Marcoses and the Dutertes.
On Monday, Akbayan party list Rep. Percival Cendaña endorsed an impeachment complaint filed by 17 personalities against Vice President Sara Duterte. The Makabayan bloc in the House of Representatives also announced that it will endorse this week a second impeachment complaint against the VP, which will be filed by “50 representatives from various progressive organizations and concerned citizens.”
Judging by the evidence unearthed by a House committee investigating VP Sara, and the acrimony between House leaders and the Vice President, the impeachment charges will muster the required 1/3 vote of all House members. This will pave the way for the complaints to be transmitted speedily to the Senate for trial.
Anyone who says that an impeachment trial in the Senate is a political exercise, should be held in contempt of the Filipino people, and detained for one week in a room that plays nonstop a recording of the profanities spewed by VP Sara. An impeachment trial requires senators to decide on whether or not the public official on trial is guilty of at least one of five impeachable offenses: culpable violation of the Constitution, treason, bribery, graft and corruption and other high crimes, and betrayal of public trust. If found guilty, the official will be removed from public office and permanently disqualified from any government position.
Such function requires the exercise of judicial responsibility imposed on political officials. To say that impeachment is a political exercise is to lay the very wrong predicate that our senators have the license to decide on the basis of political considerations such as partisanship and horse trading, and not on the guilt or innocence of the official on trial.
There will be a very strong propensity, however, for our senators to decide on political merits because of the upcoming elections. We will elect 12 senators in six months. A crucial number of the current senators who will sit as impeachment judges are either running for reelection or have relatives who are running for a Senate seat. For this group of senators, the temptation to vote on the basis of what they or their relatives can gain (or lose) politically, will be very strong. It must be remembered that the Dutertes still have a sizeable bloc of loyal voters, especially in the Visayas and Mindanao. The Dutertes are expected to flex their political muscle to make the senator-judges decide in favor of acquittal, regardless of the judicial merits of the evidence. The threat is real that those voting for VP Sara’s ouster will find solid Duterte followers campaigning against them.
To successfully impeach VP Sara, 2/3 of the Senate, or 16 senators, must vote to convict her. To acquit VP Sara, at least nine senators must vote in her favor. Of our incumbent senators, four senators (Bato dela Rosa, Bong Go, Robin Padilla, and Imee Marcos) are openly in favor of VP Sara. They need just five more senators to obtain an acquittal.
Apart from Dela Rosa, Go, and Marcos, four other senators are up for reelection next year: Bong Revilla, Pia Cayetano, Lito Lapid, and Francis Tolentino. In addition, four non-reelectionist senators have relatives running for the Senate: Cynthia Villar, Mark Villar, Allan Cayetano, and Nancy Binay. For these eight senators, the temptation will be immense to vote on the basis of political merits. And what do we make of the leanings of the rest of the non-reelectionist senators?
On the opposite side of the political divide are the Marcos loyalists. As to which group is bigger—Marcos loyalists or Duterte diehards—is anyone’s guess. Between these two groups are the yellow/pink forces who constitute a formidable 15 million voters as shown in the last elections. Should yellow/pink voters sit on the couch, popcorn in hand, and pontificate with “I told you so,” while watching the trial? If the Marcos and the Duterte camps are left to battle between themselves, the impeachment will be decided on political considerations, and the result may horrify the yellow/pink forces.
The yellow/pink forces must get actively involved in the impeachment trial by making their pivotal voices heard. They must make the senators feel that, if they do not decide on judicial merits, there will be political consequences to pay from the solid bloc of yellow/pink voters.
The senator-judges in the impeachment trial must be made aware that, while they will sit in judgment in the trial of Sara Duterte, they themselves will be on trial and the verdict for or against them will be delivered in the May 2025 elections. In other words, the impeachment trial will be a double trial—one against the Vice President, and another against the senators.
Filipino voters must stand ready to repeat what we did during the Joseph Estrada impeachment trial, when the political vote of the senators was overwhelmingly reversed and resoundingly overturned through people power.
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