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Until all this wheeling and dealing stops, accountability will remain a joke. It’s what made us the pathetic case that we are in the first place — a nation plundered blind.
Finally, the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte gets going, after being derailed twice, even before it could actually start.
The Supreme Court laid the decisive obstacle. It ruled that the House of Representatives had impeached Duterte sooner than prescribed by the Constitution — a year after the last attempt to impeach her, an unsuccessful one, as it happened. The ruling remains disputed; the contention revolves around where the count for the yearlong ban should have begun. The House did protest, but did not insist; in the end, it decided to impeach another day and concede to the court.
The other obstacle was put up by Chiz Escudero, who, as Senate president at the time, would have presided at Duterte’s trial had not the Supreme Court had time to intervene. In fact, he was commanded by the Constitution to mount the trial “forthwith,” but he quibbled with the word and made other excuses — the Senate needed its recess, it had other businesses to attend to. He glossed over the very reason why impeached officials should be judged right away — forthwith: their continuation in office and power could cause further serious and immediate danger to the nation’s well-being.
Anyway, Escudero dribbled the case for months, precisely giving the Supreme Court time to step in and rule that time was up. In sports, it’s called tanking. And in Escudero’s case, it was a tanking so crass it would have cost him a limb, if not his life, had any of those big-losing odds players got their hands on him.
But despite all that, and although no longer Senate president, he still gets to preside at the trial of the very same accused he favored by tanking. Helplessly outraged at him as the minority under his Senate presidency, the new majority, which took over after getting the vote in the midterms, obviously doesn’t mind swallowing him now — in fact, it voted unanimously to do that.
Escudero, along with Senator Joel Villanueva, switched sides to prop up the still shaky majority. Naturally, since the defections have all the marks of horse-trading, Congress being, for one thing, the precise marketplace for it, the first question to ask is, What’s the deal?
Both Escudero and Villanueva are under investigation on suspicion of benefiting from the trillion-peso plunder, by cross-agency conspiracy, that has plagued flood-control projects over the years, beginning, as traced so far, from the presidency (2016-2022) of Sara Duterte’s father, Rodrigo. Signed up not just for his vote, but as presiding officer of the impeachment court, Escudero presumably got for himself a special deal.
But what singular qualities and skills does Escudero really possess for him to be able to strike a deal like that? What makes any promise of fidelity to his word that he offers now, as a defector, suddenly credible? And, on the part of the Senate majority, what power or influence does it have to grant the deal? We’ll never know the answers to those questions for certain, but we should have a fair idea, having seen enough convicts and accused walk free on those deals.
In fact, two beneficiaries are on the impeachment court. Robin Padilla was sentenced in 1994 to a maximum of 21 years in prison for illegal possession of firearms. President Fidel Ramos granted him conditional pardon in 1998, and President Duterte made the pardon absolute upon taking office, in 2016, restoring all his rights, thus allowing him to run for the Senate in 2022. He now sits there with the minority in drooling idolatry of Rodrigo Duterte and his heirs.
Villanueva, on the other hand, is a convenient worshipper. In 2016, the ombudswoman Conchita Carpio Morales fired him and disqualified him perpetually from public office for misusing public funds when he was a party-list representative in the House of Representatives. Already a senator and one pledged to President Duterte when Morales’s order came down, he remained untouched. In 2019, he even got Morales’s successor, Samuel Martires, a Duterte appointee, to reverse her ruling. Thus, with a clean bill of untouchability, he ran, and won, a second senatorial term in 2022. Now in trouble again for corruption, he has switched his allegiance from the Duterte bloc. Like Villanueva, Martires is suspected as having received a cut from the flood-control plunder.
Politics is horse-trading and, as I have said, Congress is the marketplace for it. The trial of Sara Duterte, who stands impeached on charges of plotting the assassination of the President, his wife, and his first-cousin the former Speaker, and of embezzling hundreds of millions of taxpayer pesos, is supposed to signal that her case is past the horse-trading stage and has been elevated into the purer realm of an open, legitimate process.
But with a Chiz Escudero presiding at the trial, how can it be taken seriously? Until all this wheeling and dealing stops, accountability will remain a joke. It’s what made us the pathetic case that we are in the first place — a nation plundered blind. – Rappler.com
