Following the money meant that when former President Joseph Estrada fell, no one was prepared to catch him. The country only experienced an urban insurrection when the age-old rule of victor and vanquished in our society was broken because civil society demanded it. Then Vice President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo kicked Estrada when he was already down and out. Instead of being allowed to drown his sorrows in Polk Street, his followers and friends got enraged. The insurrection failed because it was badly led—in fact, barely led, at the end, at all.
Following the money did in Renato Corona, and in fact, his posthumous acquittal by the courts only proved the appropriateness of the penalty—removal and disqualification from office—because what needed to be resolved was whether he deserved public trust, not whether he merited a criminal conviction. One doesn’t even have to go down the path of assuming, as most might, that the judiciary will always take care of its own; one only has to acknowledge that public trust is adjudged on one track, and criminal liability, on another.
In the current case, where the Supreme Court has made certain that everyone recognizes we do not have coequal branches of government but rather a judiciary prepared to remind the other branches of their perpetual inferiority, and where the Senate itself has a majority and minority that often make the House look like the more competent chamber—unthinkable even 10 years ago even when it comes to its lawbreaking members—if you follow the money, the amazing thing is that the warped nature of everything still ends up fulfilling the intent and purpose of the procedures so thoroughly bent out of shape.
Put another way, the fundamental aspect of impeachment lost after 1987—it wasn’t lost before, simply because it was too difficult, or to be precise, no situation was so grave that it had to be resorted to—was that it is a particular kind of trial: not only by jury, but with two juries. It is the reason why a strictly party-line vote is acceptable (though not to be desired) in an American impeachment and everyone can take it in stride: the parties can be punished at the polls; it is the reason the pro-Estrada senators were punished at the polls in 2001. In that instance, despite the robes and the grandstanding of the late Sen. Aquilino Pimentel, who insisted on co-presiding, senatorial egotism was tempered by the reflected influence of the pre-martial law Senate, which may have had its fair share of crooks and fools, but who tried to be educated and competent crooks and fools.
But that was a generation ago, involving a generation of senators who understood they were participating in a procedure ultimately looking to laypeople for legitimacy. Today’s Senate is spooked by the Supreme Court’s shadow, conditioned by the hardening of political divisions to pander to their base with no consideration for the rest, and hamstrung by the vulnerability of too many of its members due to their own (alleged!) misdeeds.
Too much time is being spent dissecting the House managers’ (referred to in pedestrian style by the Senate and the media alike as “the prosecution,” further divorcing impeachment from its origins, and thus playing into the hands of those wanting to overly judicialize the proceedings) move to retain only one of the articles of impeachment and abandon the rest. The only thing worth remarking on is that it is a striking gamble, and that the behavior of the defense suggests it is convinced they have lost the case.
When the articles were withdrawn, the Senate accepted the withdrawal on condition that the same articles couldn’t be put forward for the remaining lifetime of the current Congress: there is no risk of double jeopardy. Those charges are now obsolete and will remain so until 2028—and, arguably, because of the tactical choices made by the House managers, few public officials, one would think, will ever face similar charges again.
So where is this ferocious, even if one assumes it is manufactured (or not!) demand for “fairness” coming from, which suggests that Vice President Sara Duterte was deprived of something by the House managers saving her from the possibility, however remote, she’d be convicted of the withdrawn articles of impeachment? It is a distraction to try to slow the momentum of what’s coming.
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Email: mlquezon3@gmail.com; Twitter: @mlq3