Trials

EDCEL LAGMAN says P-Noy is going overboard and flouting the law in his campaign against the Ombudsman.

“The trial by publicity and (campaign for) conviction through campus speeches being waged by President Aquino for the ouster of Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez directly influence and demean the discretion and judgment of senators who are inveigled to act like Pontius Pilates to subject their decision to the vagaries of public opinion.

“By actively, publicly and incessantly campaigning for the impeachment of the Ombudsman, President Aquino has violated the Constitution, which exclusively reserves to and vests on Congress the power to impeach and convict impeachable officials.”

Well, it’s a fine accusation coming from someone who helped kill the impeachment bids against Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo for the far bigger crime of stealing the vote. Who would have us believe that the Arroyos, man, woman, and beast, or children, did not violate the Constitution by going the rounds of Congress to persuade the congressmen by carrot and stick, by hook and by crook, by money and banishment from grace, to say goodbye to “Hello Garci.” One is tempted to ask if that did not demean the discretion and judgment of the congressmen, but the House during GMA’s and Lagman’s time was known only to say at the flash of cash, “Please demean us some more.”

P-Noy is well within his rights to go around town, especially in the campuses, campaigning against corruption, and campaigning specifically against the Ombudsman who has been party to that corruption, if only by a conspiracy of silence. I wish he would go on to campaign against GMA who is really the source of this scourge, the wellspring of this cesspool, the master of Merci who has shown this country no mercy. Which is to say I wish he would become more aggressive and not less so, more combative and not less so, more all-out and not less so. But I guess I’ll just have to wait for him to discover its wisdom, or necessity.

There is nothing wrong with calling for Gutierrez’s impeachment. There are reasonable grounds for it, and it is not just the President’s prerogative but his duty to call on the congressmen to advance his cause. So long as his exhortation is premised on persuasion and not on coercion, so long as his exhortation is premised on reason and not on bribe, so long as he is calling on the congressmen to hark to the spirit of the heroes and not to the paper upon which their faces are printed.

And there is nothing wrong with calling for Gutierrez’s ouster if by that is meant calling for Gutierrez to take a leave of absence while she is being tried. That is the decent thing to do, and if Gutierrez cannot discover delicadeza on her own, she can always be made to open her eyes to it by the power of public derision. Certainly, she continues to do harm while she stays there. Look at what she did to Jose Barredo, the whistle-blower in the fertilizer scam, whom she has included in the charge sheet despite the objections of the senators themselves who investigated the case. She can always muddle things, she can always put land mines along the way. Why should the public be powerless in the face of that? They can always say, with no small instigation by their President, “Mahiya-hiya ka naman, take a leave, take a hike, take a leak, but go away.”

But there is something wrong with calling on the senators to convict Gutierrez. To be fair though, I have not heard P-Noy himself say that. I have heard some civil society groups call for that, and I have seen stickers that call for that. I draw the line on it.

The difference is not just semantic, it is titanic. The point of an impeachment trial is not to show the inconvenience of the law, it is to unfold the majesty of the law. It is not to rush to judgment, it is to move inexorably to it. Public sympathy is not a reason for the prosecutors to botch up their job, it is an incentive for them to live up to it. What civil society should in fact be doing is to challenge the senators to meet, if not surpass the standards of Hilario Davide’s court, which showed the country the best that the law could be. What it should be doing is to exhort the senators not to succumb or lapse into legal technicality, legal chicanery, legal sleight of hand, but to show that the business of judges as much as of lawyers, is, as the sign before the UP law school says, to practice law in the grand manner.

How Gutierrez is convicted is just as important as whether she is convicted or not. Indeed doubly so in this case: She is not the end, GMA is. How Gutierrez is convicted will determine how GMA is indicted.

It is one thing to try by publicity, it is another to bring the public to try. The latter is what an impeachment trial does in its grandest form: It turns the people into the true judge of it. The real power, whence the authority of the senators themselves emanates, is the people. That was what happened during the Erap impeachment trial. It wasn’t the senators ultimately that sat as judge and rendered the verdict. It was the people.

While at that, I have yet to hear Lagman complain that his favorite president came to power because of trial by publicity. I have yet to hear Lagman propose that his favorite president should never have become so as the Senate never found Erap guilty, the people merely poached in on the exclusive right of the Senate to impeach and convict. I have yet to hear Lagman vociferate that his favorite president violated the Constitution by campaigning actively, publicly and incessantly that Erap was no longer the rightful president the people themselves, if not the Senate, had spoken, and taking her oath before the Chief Justice.

Some people try by publicity, others just try patience.