NEWSSTAND: The case for impeaching Duterte

The legal case for impeaching President Duterte is based on substantial grounds. His latest remarks about Philippine helplessness in the face of Chinese predation in our exclusive economic zone proves, yet again, that his administration’s “soft landing” policy vis-a-vis China began a deliberate and continuing effort to bend the Constitution to China’s will.

But the political case for impeaching the President is the one the administration thinks it can readily win. Presidential spokesperson Salvador Panelo once again spoke the quiet part out loud, when he described impeachment as merely a “numbers game.”

It is in fact a numbers game, in the important sense that impeachment is a political process too, undertaken by one of the two political branches of government. But it is not a political undertaking alone. The Constitution provides specific grounds for impeachment: “culpable violation of the Constitution, treason, bribery, graft and corruption, other high crimes, or betrayal of public trust.” All of these grounds require the House of Representatives, in considering impeachment, and especially the Senate, in considering conviction, to exercise a kind of judicial determination.

Indeed, the Constitution itself refers to the principal role of the Senate in an impeachment in judge-like terms: “The Senate shall have the sole power to try and decide all cases of impeachment.” Not least, when the President is the official facing an impeachment trial in the Senate, the Constitution provides that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court must preside.

Unlike in previous impeachment attempts directed against incumbent Presidents Joseph Estrada and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, whose administrations offered elaborate legal arguments, this time around the presidential palace — to the extent that Panelo may be said to represent it — reacted to the rumors of impeachment by offering the argument from number. “We have a supermajority in Congress; maybe that won’t even make it past the committee on justice.”

Like I said, Panelo, who is terrible at lying (Exhibit A: “The President does not lie”), said the quiet part out loud this time. But was he telling the truth?

It looks like it, doesn’t it? The new House has not yet chosen its Speaker, but it is safe to assume that the Duterte administration coalition will again be able to count on a supermajority. And as the 17th Congress proved in May 2017, the Duterte supermajority can quickly move to inoculate the President for a year by initiating and then summarily dismissing an impeachment complaint against him. (This is one provision in the Constitution that the Duterte administration follows unreservedly: “No impeachment proceedings shall be initiated against the same official more than once within a period of one year.”)