I listened to a constitutional lawyer yesterday explaining the matter in the clearest way so far. Inasmuch as the role of the House Secretary General in forwarding any impeachment complaint is ministerial, then the impeachment process should be deemed initiated the moment that complaint is filed.
The implication of that reading is clear: the Lozano complaint, filed a full month ahead of the others and recorded by the Secretary General minutes ahead of the others on the day this Congress opened, is the only complaint that should be given due course.
By the estimate of the pro-impeachment congressmen, the Lozano complaint is weak, if not outright defective. It will fail the test of adequacy in form and substance. For that reason, even if it will be unjust to the first complainant, they want the Lozano submission trashed.
That, however, will require infirming the rules with undue elasticity.
Most of us laymen hold a certain disdain for lawyers. Lawyers seem to always insist on the strict application of laws and rules – sometimes to the injury of what we might hold as common sense. But we forget that the reason we have laws is that "common sense" is never always commonly held.
And so the maxim: dura lex sed lex. The law may be harsh, but it is the law.
Without clear and consistent application of the rules, human communities will always be in constant turmoil. Each will insist on attributing a certain elasticity to procedures, an elasticity that benefits one interest over the other. When that happens, the law loses its value as a neutral adjudicator of conflict.
There is something unhealthy in the manner opposition propagandists constantly yak about the opposition effort being quashed "on technicality." They are poisoning public appreciation of due process.
All rules are technical. Lawyers, as agents of the courts, are technicians of the law. Their role is to tell us what is legally possible and what is not, regardless of the discomforts that might induce.
By poisoning public appreciation of the procedural requirements of the impeachment process, these opposition spokesmen seem to be setting the stage for continuing agitation long after this matter is over and done with. They are pursuing a separate agenda it would seem.
There is reason to suspect that agenda to be the senatorial elections of 2005. Those most visible and most vocal among the proponents of impeachment at the House strikes me as a band of ambitious young politicians, a virtual senatorial slate for the next elections.
The impeachment effort might be vain, incompetently managed and thus futile. But it provides a convenient springboard for acquiring nationwide name-recall.
This band of ambitious young politicians are betting that GMA’s popularity ratings will remain low through the period to May 2007. It would therefore be an electoral advantage to be young, articulate and anti-Gloria.
In pursuit of this agenda, the theatrical elements of this episode must be maximized. It is important for the electoral agenda of the ambitious young trapos to guise up this incompetent impeachment effort as some sort of a crusade for, among others, good government and new politics. In a word, guise it up in all the goody-good phrases that have, in the end, little meaning.
This is impeachment in aid of electoral ambition. Which is why I instinctively cringe each time these vain young congressmen appear, waving heavily smudged election returns or mustering audio-visual presentations accusing the President of acts of terrorism, saying their cause is a matter of conscience.
At the risk of sounding cynical, let me say this: I have known Filipino politics too intimately to gullibly take in acts of obvious grandstanding such as we have seen the past few weeks.
One might argue, of course, that personal ambitions and correct causes might coincide. Of course.
That does not, however, spare correct causes from the test of substantial validity and technical adequacy.
Among the things I have learned in my long tenure in movement politics that correct causes often induce tunnel vision. Tunnel vision creates disproportional appreciation of the universe of things at hand. Disproportional appreciation in turn ultimately injures long-term public interest.
Today, from all indications, the House Justice Committee will bow to the rules and accord primacy to the first impeachment complaint.
In this case, obedience to the rules will also coincide with the goals of regime survival. No matter how obsessively some might want to see this President impeached, we all must also grant her the right to fight for her political survival.
Those little boys at Congress who want to oust the President of the Republic, in their desperate effort to stave off imminent defeat, have tried on the one hand to unjustly inflate the case they have and demanded that the rules be interpreted loosely to give them unwarranted advantage. On the other hand, they try to convince the public that any effort a sitting President does to strengthen her own case is unjust.
That I do not understand.
If the impeachment effort takes another blow today, it will be because of only two things: the case lacks in merit and the effort to present that case lacks in competence. It is tempting to say that this whole hullabaloo also lacks in purity of motive. But I will not get into that.
Those obsessively wanting to impeach the President – or at least prolong the effort to maximize their longing for more media visibility – will be severely disappointed that the majority of their colleagues will apply the rules rigorously and, in so doing, prevent this carnival from prospering. That, too, brings some good to the long-term goals of republicanism and strong institutions.