Waste

Despite a hectic schedule, I thought I had an obligation to observe the debates last Tuesday at the House Committee on Justice over the merits of the second impeachment complaint against the President. I presumed it might be educational for a professional observer of Filipino politics.

I presumed wrongly. The whole thing was a waste of time.

The opposition had a year to prepare a tight impeachment complaint. They came up with a lousy one – a complaint dazzling only because it had so many leaps in logic.

Instead of filing the same complaint over and over again, they might have put in some effort at improving it. It seems the lawyers of the pro-impeachment groups were too busy doing the rounds of television talk shows to do any real work at producing a document that could stand the glare of intelligent scrutiny.

Instead of offering a compelling recitation of facts, the complaint had only a litany of shrill allegations. Instead of new revelations, the complaint had an attachment containing the names of people who were allegedly killed for political reasons. In a great demonstration of rhetorical acrobatics, the President was held responsible for all those killed (imaginably) for political reasons.

Those who delivered speeches looked strangely like the senatorial line-up of the Drilon faction of the Liberal Party for the May 2007 elections. There they were, exactly at prime time, delivering sophomoric dissertations generously loaded with demagoguery about "truth" and "justice."

They all looked guilty of premature campaigning. Perhaps the Comelec should look into this.

I have never seen so many speeches, delivered in sequence, all quoting from the dictionary. One gets the unfair impression that there is nothing else on the shelves of congressmen other than dictionaries.

How many of us, after all, needed Cong. Golez to read all the dictionary definitions of recitation in order to beef up the argument that the complaint had a "recitation of facts" as required by the rules laid out for impeachment proceedings. The more important word in the phrase is, I suppose, facts.

And facts is what the complaint lacked.

Perhaps Golez should have looked up all the dictionary meanings of facts – and then asked the pro-impeachment lawyers memorize each one by heart. He should have exercised them further by asking them to memorize all the dictionary definitions of allegation. Then, as a final exercise, asked them to distinguish between the two words.

Only then should they have proceeded to file this redundant impeachment complaint.

Well, to be fair, there was some quoting from Alexander Hamilton and The Federalist Papers. But all the citations and all the name-dropping failed to answer the principal questions at the top of the people’s mind – the most important being: Why are we all wasting our time doing this?

In the midst of all the dictionary-reading, and all the strained efforts of congressmen to demonstrate a fair amount of literacy, my mind began to stray. I began to contemplate the grim fate of leadership in this forsaken country.

If every communist killed (possibly by his own comrades) precipitates an impeachment complaint, then should the President do nothing else but look over the shoulders of every soldier in the field to make sure human rights are respected?

If every executive order signed by the President could possibly set an impeachment process into motion, should the Chief Executive then desist from issuing any such orders?

If the President is going to be held accountable for every lapse that every bureaucrat might commit, will the Chief Executive have any time to do any productive work?

I know of many cases where bureaucrats nearing retirement refuse to make decisions that might imperil their retirement benefits, preferring to doodle on their desks until their last day in the service. Such cases paralyze the work of government.

If the President of the Republic will face impeachment proceedings every year for every decision that one or the other citizen might disagree with, are we not creating conditions for indecisive leadership? Won’t presidents be safer in office if they did nothing?

It is standard feature in all modern republican constitutions to grant chief executives immunity from suit while in office. That is to prevent the squandering of precious executive time responding to the most inane suits and all sorts of complaints intending merely to harass the chief decision-maker.

But the opposition in this country of extremely talented politicians have found a way to skirt around that otherwise reasonable protection for the head of state: they invented serial impeachment.

On top of that, in the case of this latest impeachment complaint, our politicians have also invented impeachment-on-any-excuse.

We should have this patented before other nations come out with pirated versions of this great invention. This is such an effective way to make sure the Chief Executive’s energy for productive work is constantly impaired and Congress constantly distracted.

One of those pro-impeachment congressmen might also want to make money by writing a how-to book. The book might be titled How to Win a Seat in the Senate by Endorsing an Impeachment Complaint at the House.

Among the few wise things in the 1987 Constitution is that provision that prohibits the filing of more than one impeachment complaint in a year. The intention here is to prevent impeachment from becoming a cottage industry and to allow some breathing space for government to get some work done in between orgies of excessive politicking.

That provision has, obviously, failed to bar the continuing carnival we now endure: a fixation with using impeachment-in-aid-of-election that has prevented Congress from enacting a new budget for years.