Let the process work

In the span of a few weeks, the Senate gave us chaos and confusion in its halls, senators in tears, a walkout that stopped a proposal being rammed through, and a public quarrel over whether members should be allowed to vote by video conference. Schools from De La Salle to Ateneo to Assumption scolded their own alumni in government. Something has gone terribly wrong when the country’s elite schools start lecturing the very people they produced.

Politics is clearly muddling the national conversation. Strip away the posturing, however, and the Senate drama is about one thing: the coming impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte, set to begin on July 6. That, in turn, is part of the larger Duterte-Marcos saga that began with the arrest of former president Rodrigo Duterte and his transfer to The Hague to answer for crimes against humanity before the International Criminal Court.

The lines have long been drawn. The Duterte camp wants to recapture Malacañang in 2028, though that will not bring the elder Duterte back home. The vice president currently rides on her father’s popularity, and the surveys flatter her camp. But surveys measure today’s mood, not tomorrow’s, and recent polls also show that most Filipinos want the impeachment to run its normal course.

Many are disappointed at how low the Senate has sunk. For my part, I see it as part of a continuum, the long aftermath of the bastardization of our institutions during the Duterte years. The Duterte brand was never about respecting institutions. It was about exposing their hypocrisy, then replacing institutional restraint with populist swagger.

The clearest signal came in 2016, when Duterte did not even bother to appear before Congress to have his hand raised as the winner. He stayed in Davao City, purportedly to work on city documents and meet with supporters, and sent his lawyers to represent him. But the meaning was obvious. He skipped the ritual as if to say he would govern by his own rules, and that no institution could stop him because they were all shams anyway. In much of the Visayas and Mindanao, where people had long blamed an imperial, Manila-centered government for their hardships, that message landed.

That is why we should cut through the noise by asking what each institution is for, and then demanding that it do its job. The flood-control scandal belongs first to the Ombudsman, whose investigation is already moving and where charges have begun to be filed. As Tingog party-list Representative Jude Acidre has said, let the Ombudsman do its job.

Meanwhile, preventing the next scandal is the work of Congress, inquiring in aid of legislation without fear or favor. Where the Department of Justice or the Ombudsman has found probable cause, the cases belong to the courts and the Sandiganbayan, and their orders must be promptly carried out. The test is the same, whoever is in the dock. And the impeachment belongs to the Senate sitting as a court.

This is not naive faith. Or if it is, it is intentional naivety. We all know the Ombudsman can stall, prosecutors can be captured, Congress can grandstand, and the justice system can be compromised. The so-called “process” has been gamed before. Yet we choose that faith anyway, with our eyes open.

To dismiss the institutions and lose faith is the easier course, and the wrong one. When we give up on our country’s institutions, we are not rewarded with better ones. The space left by our hopelessness is usually filled by someone who promises to rule without institutions at all.