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Impeachment is an emergency judicial process. Its medical equivalent is a procedure undertaken to stanch a life-threatening hemorrhage.
In 2019, President Rodrigo Duterte raised a scandal when he said the Constitution was good only as toilet paper. Well, yesterday, the Supreme Court came out of the bathroom upholding him.
In fact, the Constitution is holy writ. It holds the final word on what is right and what is wrong for democracies. Of course, like any writ, it comprises erasable words on destructible paper, but, from all that, a pure, unwastable, unkillable spirit lives on, as Duterte himself should by now have realized.
Intoxicated by presidential power, having come to it from running a provincial city as an autocratic mayor, Duterte prescribed that the Constitution be thrown in the sewers. For the sacrilege, its spirit haunted him, as far as The Hague, in the Netherlands, six and a half thousand miles away. He’s now being held in detention there awaiting trial by the International Criminal Court on charges of “crimes against humanity” in the death of thousands in his war on drugs.
Another Duterte happens to be the intended beneficiary of the Supreme Court’s toilet verdict — daughter Sara, the vice president. She was impeached by the House of Representatives for the misspending, if not malversation, of hundreds of millions of pesos in her budget. The evidence, backed by official audit, had been turned up at exhaustive hearings she herself had snubbed, arrogantly refusing to explain herself.
The court declared her impeachment by the House of Representatives unconstitutional — unconstitutional, I can only presume, by some authority other than the Constitution, since the Constitution had been flushed away.
Possibly deluded by its titular supremeness, the Court dared put its fingers where they shouldn’t be — in the impeachment pie. An “overreach!” protested Antonio Carpio, who himself once sat on that court. I think I understood him, and heard the alarm — must have been, again, promptings by the avenging spirit rising out of the desecration of the Constitution.
Impeachment is exclusively Congress business — the House proposes, the Senate disposes; the former impeaches, the latter tries. The Supreme Court is out of it. But, still, it entertains a petition asking it to declare Duterte’s impeachment technically flawed, thus unlawful. So, it takes the Constitution to the bathroom and comes out with a new suitable authority for granting the petition, and that authority is its own arbitrary word.
It all appears to be part of a conspiracy, really, and that conspiracy began to be mounted in the Senate. Upon receiving the Articles of Impeachment, on which Duterte was to be tried by the Senate constituted as a court, Chiz Escudero, the Senate and now court president, quibbled endlessly about the adverb in the constitutional command, Try forthwith. It was the first word in the Constitution that went down the toilet, and it was the operative word.
Impeachment is an emergency judicial process. Its medical equivalent is a procedure undertaken to stanch a life-threatening hemorrhage. In Sara Duterte’s case, it’s a reckoning in the interest of the taxpayers, to whom, after all, belonged the blood money lost in her charge. Analogously, stanching consists in removing her automatically as vice president, being the cause of the hemorrhage, and banning her perpetually from holding public office, once found guilty. As it happens, the process has not even begun.
After months of dribbling the case without actually starting the trial, the impeachment court returned the Articles of Impeachment to the House, asking it to certify that the rule requiring an impeachment to be initiated at least one year after the last one had been met. Contending that it was an issue that, if indeed a debatable one, should be resolved at trial, the House stood on the certainty of its case; it felt it didn’t need to reply.
Thus, the signal went out. Duterte’s lawyers went to the Supreme Court with their petition, and the Court obliged to insinuate itself, doing as the Senate had done, telling the House to explain itself.
The House continued to stand its ground, invoking separation of powers where it applied, implicitly telling the court that certain House business is no Supreme Court business. That’s when the court went to the bathroom and came out with a verdict: Sara Duterte should not have been impeached.
Now, the haunting begins. – Rappler.com
