THIS late in the day, Filipinos still have no idea whether we could expect an impeachment trial as envisioned by the Constitution at all.
Vice President Sara Duterte now wants her case dismissed for supposedly being baseless. Her trial must not proceed, she said, because the circumstances that surrounded the filing of the complaint were unconstitutional.
The case, she said in her response to the Senate, is “nothing more than a scrap of paper.”
What ever happened to the bloodbath that the VP said she expected to unleash during her trial? She uttered this challenge only last month.
It now appears that the progress of the impeachment trial would hinge on technicalities when all the people truly wanted was to get to the substance of the issue: why won’t Ms. Duterte come clean about how she spent her confidential funds?
We saw how our elected senators comported themselves when it came to deciding on whether or not to convene as an impeachment court. Some of the senators flaunted their political leanings, abandoning all pretense to impartiality even as they had been sworn as senator-judges. They had the temerity to remand the complaint to the House of Representatives; fortunately, the latter acted swiftly and released a resolution saying that the complaint complied with the Constitution.
As the world reels from uncertainty from the recent events in the Middle East, we are also reeling from the political theater that is unfolding in our own backyard. Surveys have shown, time and again, that Filipinos are most concerned with their economic prospects – being able to afford the prices of goods, landing jobs, earning fair wages.
That they must be privy to all the drama, when all they want is to know how taxpayers’ money was released and spent, supposedly for their benefit, is an unnecessary insult.
The impeachment complaint is a piece of paper all right – many pieces of it, to be sure – but it is never scrap because it embodies the people’s resort to Constitutional means to hold their officials accountable for their actions. The VP should stop stoking people’s emotions, alternating between talking tough and portraying herself the victim of persecution. She must instead take the opportunity afforded by the law as a platform to prove her innocence, if she is indeed that.
