Will the impeachment bid against the President prosper?
The answer to that is still easy. No, it won’t. Though the bid has gotten a little more serious with a lot more serious people pushing for it—or with a lot less shady characters doing so—it lacks, to put it mildly, clout in Congress. Impeachment as a political measure is a numbers game, and P-Noy has the overwhelming numbers, for reasons that owe to more than just the loyalty, or sycophancy, of the congressmen to Malacañang. It owes to their respect for P-Noy, too, a thing he has clearly earned.
Should the impeachment prosper? The answer to that is not as easy. The bid has gotten a lot more serious with a lot more serious reasons being advanced for it. Impeachment is a moral measure, too, and goes beyond congressional numbers. It might not carry any clout among the congressmen, but it could do so among the public. It might not greatly dent the President’s hold on power, but it could greatly dent his hold on credibility, never mind popularity.
The group that filed the impeachment bid against the President cites two things. One is his culpable violation of the Constitution with the DAP (Disbursement Acceleration Program), indeed his continuing prosecution of it in defiance of the Supreme Court. Two is his possible use of the DAP for less than the lofty purposes he adduces—“he has created his own pork barrel worth P144 billion, [which] he has showered on his pet projects.”
It’s the first point that carries weight. I’ve always been astonished by the way some news stories phrase it, which is that the Supreme Court found “some parts of the DAP unconstitutional.” Or indeed by the way some commentators put it, which is that the Court did not find the DAP unconstitutional, only some parts of it. That’s crazy.
But of course the Court found the DAP unconstitutional. At the very least that is so because it found the crucial parts of it unconstitutional. The justices were unanimous and unequivocal in saying that three things were so—the conversion of unobligated funds into savings, cross-border transfers, the funding of projects outside the GAA (General Appropriations Act). Those are the heart of the DAP.
We know that from the fact that P-Noy himself defended the DAP the other Monday by saying that though he was parked on a “no-parking zone,” he needed to address a pressing need, an urgent need, an emergency. Government, he said, needed to put idle money into projects that were moving, the better to do good for the people. Waiting for the normal, constitutionally-sanctioned, way of spending money meant doing things too little too late. Emergencies waited for no one. That is the heart of the DAP. The Court could not have found that unconstitutional without finding the entire DAP unconstitutional.
At the very most, even if it were not, what are we saying—a program, policy, or law is sound, legal, or constitutional because the courts found only parts of it to be not so? A judgment on the part is a judgment on the whole.
The second point is just an accusation, but it is one that carries fairly consequential consequences. It makes P-Noy vulnerable to a couple of things.
One is that if you say any suspicion of irregularity remains to be proven, and pending an investigation of the DAP Butch Abad et al. may be presumed to have conducted themselves in an honest, if not exemplary, way, you are faced with the question of who is going to conduct that inquiry. If you can disregard the justices’ finding that the DAP is unconstitutional, you can most certainly disregard any executive office’s (the justice department’s, the Ombudsman’s) finding that the DAP was abused. You can always say that that office is wrong, or, as with the justices, that it failed to appreciate the legal and national-welfare aspects of things.
That applies as well to a Senate investigation, if at all it can be mounted.
Two is that P-Noy’s implicit call for the public to take him at his word when he says the DAP was used judiciously labors from a glaring weakness. That is that government is not just P-Noy, it is also his people. The DAP is not just P-Noy, it is also his people. I myself have no problems trusting P-Noy. It’s not just that he is arguably one of the most trustworthy people in this country—though there’s that, too, and prodigiously so—it is also that he is not riddled with self-interest. He has no plan to stay on, he has no plan to run again, he has no plan to have another six years of power. His people do.
Mar Roxas does, Butch Abad does, the Liberal Party does. The temptation to channel the “savings” toward that end is immense, particularly with the election just down the corner. As Oscar Wilde said, “I can resist everything, except temptation.” Trust them is one very big leap of faith we’re being asked to do.
I myself would be loath to see the moral, quite apart from political, aspects of P-Noy’s impeachment prosper. My reason for it being his epic achievements in the last four years. The unprecedented growth hailed by the global community itself, the peace agreement with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which promises a bright future for Muslim Mindanao, and the indictment of Senators Juan Ponce Enrile, Jinggoy Estrada and Bong Revilla are chief of them. Those are not just accomplishments, those are feats.
But for that to happen, P-Noy will have to back down on the DAP, retreat from it, distance himself from it. To stick to it is to supply his detractors with all the ammunition they need to bring him down. To insist on it is to give a public that has trusted him, that has kept faith with him, that has accepted his depiction of what state the nation is over the last four years, to wonder if they should continue to do so. To cling to it is to let slip the wonders he has wrought.
And for what?