[Newspoint] All politics

Raphael Reyes

The trial is increasingly revealing itself as more, much more, political than legal business. All too obviously, just about any intervention, any utterance, any vote cast by a senator-judge is politically loaded.

AT A GLANCE

• The court has taken the view that four senators are incapable of doing their duty as judges and, therefore, should not be allowed to vote on Duterte’s fate.
• The number of senator-judges was reduced from 24 to 20, lowering the two-thirds threshold for conviction from 16 to 14 votes.
• The trial is perceived as politically charged, with significant implications for Duterte's future and the integrity of the impeachment process.

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The impeachment court has ruled: 14 votes to find the Vice President, Sara Duterte, guilty. She is on trial in the Senate on charges of, among others, embezzling taxpayer pesos in the hundreds of millions and of hiring an assassin to kill the President and his wife and his cousin the former Speaker. 

The court has taken the view that four senators are incapable of doing their duty as judges and, therefore, should not be allowed to vote on Duterte’s fate. Two of these four are detained without bail on charges of plunder, one is a fugitive from justice, and one is out of the country on an indefinite medical leave, although also under preliminary investigation herself on suspicion of plunder and graft. All four are minority senators.

Since, with those disqualifications, the number of senator-judges comes down from 24 to 20, the two-thirds threshold provided by the Constitution comes down too, proportionately, from 16 to 14. That’s the math that shall apply.

It seems a foregone conclusion that Duterte’s lawyers will go to the Supreme Court to question its constitutionality, such being their wont. But is it the right time? Will the court, if it intervenes at all, do it before the threshold is actually applied to convict Duterte or afterward, when there might be an immediate justiciable case for wrongful conviction? 

A funny thing, by the way, happened on the way to the vote. Mark Villar did not join sister Camille and the five other capable senators in the minority in boycotting it. Camille even shed tears to prelude the boycott. She took the floor, rare for her, and poured her heart out for the two plunder indictees for having been called, as she had heard it, “plunderers,” already presumed guilty. She actually had heard wrong, and her ears were straightened out promptly.

At any rate, her brother did vote; he opposed lowering the threshold. Still, while he may have simply chosen the normal, undramatic, dry way of expressing dissent, breaking with family and party meant breaking from a herd that all these nearly three months of trial had marched closely together, in lockstep, and in the same direction. That’s why the break set off speculations about his standing with the minority. Those speculations are, without doubt, wishful ones, as might be expected in a highly politically charged case.

Ah, but Chiz Escudero — trust him to be cool, decisive, quick, clever, and, yes, suitably learned. He asks critical questions that have gone unasked and refines and sharpens vague or technically couched questions, in that way making himself a decided help to the lay multitudes like me watching the trial on television or online. All in all, I’d say, he has run the trial smoothly, prudently, fairly. 

In fact, he even manages to make himself not look bad when he should have looked worse, say, after making a bad call, as he precisely, and prematurely, did at the outset on the very issue of the threshold vote. Upon assuming the presidency of the court, he declared that two-thirds equals 16 of the 24 senators makes for the immutable math prescribed by the Constitution.

When his pronouncement was put to a vote, he stuck to his guns, siding with the minority, in this one instance anyway. But once voted down, he conceded to the majority. 

“While the chair takes exception to this decision, the chair nonetheless accepts it as a judgment of this court and is bound to give it effect. The presiding officer, after all, is not the court. He is merely the custodian of the process, not the proprietor of it,” he said. He was speaking in illeism, referring to himself in the third person (“the chair,” “the presiding officer,” “he”), as Julius Caesar did writing about himself crossing the Rubicon. And, I must say, with genuine amusement, the style quite suits him.  

But before I forget myself and blindly go overboard, let me point out that Escudero’s gracious concession was a mere one-off, a procedural one-off; it commits him to nothing else. In fact, although situationally open to the danger of slip-ups as court president, having to make spot rulings in the course of the trial, he does not seem to me to have ever given himself away.

But then again, who am I kidding? The trial is increasingly revealing itself as more, much more, political than legal business. All too obviously, just about any intervention, any utterance, any vote cast by a senator-judge is politically loaded.

Which is singularly unfortunate, since, even under the rigors of a regular court trial, this impeachment case needs little proving. An acquittal thus opens up an opportunity for the impeached to continue plaguing the nation with the ruinous ways for which she was impeached in the first place. – Rappler.com