People power
Someone asked me why I’ve thrown my support behind P-Noy’s public indictment of Renato Corona and call for the people to voice their sentiments through some kind of People Power when there’s an impeachment going on.
For a couple of reasons.
First because like P-Noy, or like most Filipinos, I’ve gotten flustered by the pace and shape of the proceedings. The impeachment court began by recognizing fundamental premises. One was that it was not an ordinary court or a court of law. It wasn’t merely that an impeachment court is an extraordinary court assembled to do an extraordinary thing, which is to try an extraordinary official. It was also, looking at it from another angle, that the senator-judges were not lawyers—or at least most of them were not so. They were not supposed to talk like lawyers, they were not supposed to act like lawyers, they were not supposed to look at things like lawyers. They were supposed to talk and act and look at things the way we, the citizens, did.
Two, which bolstered that understanding, was that the court existed only to reveal the truth, to uncover the truth, to bring the truth to the light of day. That was to be the guiding spirit of the trial. Prosecution agreed so, defense agreed so, even Renato Corona agreed so. The point was not to hide anything, the point was to leave no stone unturned.
Then before you knew it, defense had managed to prevent the court from talking about Corona’s ill-gotten wealth because the prosecution had failed to specify that explicitly in its articles of impeachment. You can talk about Corona lying through his teeth about his SALN, but you cannot talk about Corona lying through his teeth about his SALN to hide his ill-gotten wealth.
Before you knew it, defense had managed to prevent the court from opening Corona’s dollar accounts. Never mind that it put privacy in one’s dollar deposits on par with privacy in one’s own home—it was absolute, said Miriam Defensor-Santiago—mind only the mind-boggling “colonial mentality,” as we like to call it, it perpetuates. What earthly, or hellish, reason makes pesos open season and dollars as closed as Fort Knox? The corrupt are more likely to hold peso than dollar accounts? You want an impeachable crime, there is an impeachable crime: Trampling on the flag. And the senator-judges who voted for the Supreme Court’s TRO are guilty of it.
Then before you knew it, everyone was talking like lawyers, acting like lawyers, looking at things like lawyers. No longer demanding that the truth be the horse that pulled the cart of law to wherever it would take it; agreeing instead that the law be the horse to drag along the cart of truth whenever it felt like it.
I sympathize with P-Noy’s impatience. I empathize with P-Noy’s dismay. I support his call for the people to do something about it.
Second because we can do something about it. We have People Power, whose anniversary we mark this Saturday, whose spirit we need badly to rekindle today.
Is it bypassing the impeachment? Is it screwing the impeachment?
Not at all.
At the very least, defense itself isn’t confining its defense to the impeachment court. After complaining against “trial by publicity,” it went on to do the worst version of it, accusing P-Noy on the strength of the word of an unknown source of trying to bribe off the senator-judges. As it turned out, the senator-judges voted in favor of the TRO. So what did that mean? It was really the woman in the Hannibal-Lecter mask who did the bribing? Defense got off very lightly with the cheap shot.
At the very most, People Power does not contradict representative democracy, it complements it. People Power does not diminish representative democracy, it replenishes it.
It was Juan Ponce Enrile who talked about representative democracy at the beginning of Corona’s trial. His point was for the public to leave the impeachment well enough alone. We are a representative democracy, he said, we have them to do the job for us.
Not really. In a real representative democracy, the people do not disappear after elections, the people do not go mute outside of elections. They are part of the fabric of everyday governance. They participate fully in everyday political life. They do that by way of public opinion, which shapes policies and decisions as powerfully, if not more so, as what the secretaries, the legislators and the justices themselves do. When they say they will write their congressmen, they do not expect to be ignored, they expect their congressman to listen. When they pay their taxes, they expect their taxes to go back to them, it is their money after all, and not to be divided as spoils by officials. When they bristle at an official who behaves egregiously scandalously, they expect that official to slink away in shame, if not shoot himself in the heart, they do not expect that official to do a pakapalan.
Here, what “representative democracy” really means is that after voting, the people slink away, if not in shame, at least in silence. After voting, the people get out of their officials’ way. Try writing your congressman and see where it gets you.
People Power has always been our way of making up for that. Although so far we’ve resorted to it only in dire extremities. I’ve always thought People Power could evolve into something akin to the way the citizens of truly democratic countries are able to be heard in everyday life. But that’s another story. For the nonce, we do have another dire extremity in our hands, the very future of this country being at stake in the drama unfolding before us today. We cannot afford to be mere spectators in it. We can do something about it.
We are the people, we have the power.
