Parting shot

The deed is done! By a vote of 158 in favor of the House justice committee report dismissing the complaints against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, 51 against and 6 abstentions, the impeachment of GMA was pronounced dead. But whether GMA’s political crisis is behind her is still hotly debated.

Why does GMA’s fate continue to divide this nation, despite the House action and calls for unity and renewed focus on putting our economy back on track? It’s not simply because she was let off the hook by her supporters in the House. The pro-impeachment congressmen admit they expected to lose both the committee and the full House votes.

They claim, however, that they did not expect the way capital punishment was implemented. If they had only been given an opportunity to present evidence, they say, even if only before the justice committee, they would have been satisfied.

That, too, is what protesters, led by two widows, two ex-presidential candidates, a University president, former GMA cabinet officials and veterans from radical groups, are lamenting. The majority is charged with manipulating the legal process to prevent any, that’s any, of the evidence against the respondent from seeing the light of day.

As far as I’m concerned, what was really important in this exercise was not whether GMA was convicted or acquitted. What really mattered was the process. If it was fair, if it had given the impression of having genuinely tried to uncover the truth, if we had seen elected representatives of the people grappling with the evidence in an honest effort to determine if the Constitution and the law had been trifled with, then the outcome might have been more palatable.

There would still have been disagreement, whatever the result, but when the process had run its course, the charges against the President would at least have been fully and fairly heard. When the President said she was willing to go through impeachment, it was widely thought that the facts would at last come to light. That, I also believe, is what the Catholic bishops meant when they took the position that the Constitutional process must be allowed to take its course.

The legal process was never meant to block the search for truth from ever getting started, by cleverly devising procedural rules to ensure that result. Yes, it’s a political exercise, but it’s not entirely partisan either, so that, whatever the truth, the President would be saved at all costs. If that were the case, then the only politics that is in play in this country is the irresponsible kind where only self-interest is relevant.

The opposition is not entirely blameless for what has happened. By agreeing to the impeachment rules of the 11th Congress, it made possible the outright dismissal of the Lozano complaint without the need of any presentation of evidence, without hearing and without any half-way decent investigation of any of the charges.

This ridiculous situation came about because the 11th Congress rules, as we noted many times in this space even when the charade was in progress, require a finding of sufficiency of the complaint in form and substance before the mechanics for adversarial pleadings and a hearing lock in, the so-called "probable cause" phase.

In the determination of sufficiency in substance, the rules do not require that any evidence be presented by the complainant. The rules do say that the requirement of substance is met by a recital of facts constituting the offense charged and that those facts constitute an impeachable offense. But the justice committee also took the position that the facts alleged cannot be presumed to be correct, even for the limited purpose of determining of sufficiency in substance.

Thus, in the essentially preliminary phase of finding sufficiency in form and substance, the main argument of the majority was that the allegations were based on illegally-obtained, and thus inadmissible, evidence i.e. the Garci tapes.

You might say that, even for a layman, the matter of substantial sufficiency is better threshed out after an investigation and hearing. Here, the basic charge, electoral fraud, might have been established by evidence other than the Garci tapes.

But the majority could also argue that the rules only require an analysis of allegations in the complaint, without regard to other extraneous facts or circumstances, much less the need for evidence to be presented by the complainant.

How did this atrocious result come about? In the previous 12th Congress impeachment rules, as well as in the majority’s proposal for rules to be applied in this 13th Congress, the requirement on sufficiency in substance read as follows: "The requirement of sufficiency in substance is met if there is a recital of facts constituting the offense charged and determinative of the jurisdiction of the committee and there is a reasonable ground to believe that the wrongdoing charged has been committed on the basis of the complaint and the evidence by the complainant."

The italicized phrase above was left out of the 11th Congress rules which also governed the GMA proceedings. Thus, the submission of pleadings, testimonial and documentary evidence and the hearing could take place only after the finding of sufficiency in form and substance which, under the present rules, do not require presentation of any evidence.

Does this sound like a screwed-up procedure? Of course it does. The Constitution, by the way, says: "The Committee, after hearing, and by a majority vote of all the Members, shall submit its report to the House within sixty session days from such referral together with corresponding resolution." (italics mine) Nothing there about a hearing only after a finding of sufficiency in form and substance. In fact, nothing about a preliminary finding of sufficiency in form and substance.

The House may promulgate rules to "effectively carry out the purposes" of the Constitution’s impeachment provisions (Art. XI, Sec.3(h)). One of the issues in Atty. Ernesto Francisco’s re-filed complaint before the Supreme Court is whether the House rules frustrate, rather than effectively carry out, the purposes of impeachment. He thinks these House rules should be declared unconstitutional.

The killing of the impeachment without any evidence having been presented to the House committee on justice is one of the reasons for the widespread perception that those who favored the dismissal of the Lozano complaint were complicit in a cover-up of the truth. If closure is what we wanted, closure is what we did not get.