Futile

The House Committee on Justice yesterday junked the impeachment complaint filed against the President of the Republic. The complaint was earlier judged sufficient in form but eventually found to be insufficient in substance.

There was no surprise in that.

The complaint itself is a wooly assembly of old issues and new innuendos. It was, as were the previous complaints, incapable of galvanizing political opinion to its side.

It was, from the very start, a futile endeavor. It did not, as one congressman put it, have the “beef” to make its consideration worth the public expense the ritual entailed.

This business of filing an impeachment complaint against the highest public official of the land has become an annual ritual. It consumes a lot of passion and wastes a lot of time. By this point, it should be condemned as nothing more than a nuisance in aid of free publicity for a few.

Those responsible for this series of doomed impeachment filings have been putting the cart ahead of the horse these past few years. They have forgotten, or conveniently overlooked, the fact that an impeachment is primarily a political act. Since it is that, the actual filing of a complaint ought to be the culmination of a political process — not its origin.

There must first be a compelling public consensus that the highest elected public official, enjoying in principle security of tenure, needs to be pre-terminated in the national interest. Its requirement cannot be merely allegations of wrongdoing. Its vital prerequisite is a belief that pre-terminating the tenure of a public official will bring immensely greater good to the people than respecting security of tenure, which is a public good in itself.

If there are negligible social costs to respecting security of tenure of elected public office, that should be merely discounted as part of the usual risks of electoral democracy. The people’s choice might not be the embodiment of perfection. But that is the solemn outcome of an exercise of public choice.

Pre-terminating the term of an elected public official ought not to be taken lightly. It is not something to be toyed with only to win media mileage. It is a proposition that the people must consider gravely. Only when a firm public consensus has emerged, only when by the highest standards of statesmanship has it been deemed that the nation will be imperiled by continuance in elective office by the obviously unfit, should an impeachment proceeding be initiated.

Forgive the analogy, but impeachment is about the equivalent of the sacrament of extreme unction for an elected government. It is never performed to compel rehabilitation. It is not a restorative ritual. It is gift given the terminally ill at the moment when death is certain.

There ought to be minimum conditions pertaining to merit the initiation of an impeachment exercise. The nation must first be in grave danger and convinced that it is to merit a reversing what the sovereign will of the electorate caused to be put in place.

Unless those minimum conditions pertain, the initiation of impeachment proceedings cheapens this most sovereign act of removing a high official of the land. Impeachment becomes nothing more than just another tool in the arsenal of political gimmickry. The sanctity of this political weapon of last resort is ripped away and the public is mistreated to what amounts to nothing more than political burlesque.

In a word, the unwarranted filing of an impeachment complaint is ultimately an assault on our democratic culture. It desecrates the guarantee of tenure that helps keep our institutions strong. It submits everything that republicanism is about to the altar of political grandstanding.

By taking impeachment so over lightly, the proponents of these doomed impeachment attempts drag our democracy to the ground. The delight at political carnivals offers no reverence for the integrity of our institutions.

Filipinos, our foreign friends say, have a truly unusual penchant for self-laceration. But a line must be drawn between our seeming propensity to constantly self-destruct and the necessities of conserving and nurturing our public institutions.

See what examples of political banality we have managed to export.

In Thailand, a group that has misnamed itself People’s Alliance for Democracy has been sitting around in the streets, chanting as if to exorcise their nation of a government that the majority of their countrymen installed and, lately, assaulting that nation’s premier airport to force out a government a cruel minority happens to dislike.

A great unseriousness has descended upon our politics. We have evolved a political culture where cheap shots are allowed to pass unchallenged, where the most sacred chambers of representative democracy become the preferred sites for political circuses. Mudslinging has replaced well-reasoned argument as the weapons of choice for settling political disputes.

The world is swirling in an unprecedented economic crisis. The second-wave effects of a global financial meltdown could soon sweep into our shores in the form of a debilitating economic slowdown.

And while that happens, the political opposition, like the insane Nero of ancient Rome, would rather fiddle while everything else burns. They would rather commit acts of sacrilege on the most sacred instruments of democratic rule than convene to be useful in saving the nation from the adverse effects of a global storm.

This totally unserious impeachment gimmick was not just unsurprisingly junked. It rightly deserves to be condemned for what it truly is: an irresponsible indulgence in wasteful gimmickry.