Credibility is the most important asset the impeachment process needs to conserve. Yet it is the asset to casually expended in the process so far.
By its nature, the impeachment process is distasteful. It involves removing an official installed by popular vote. In the case of Sara Duterte, the electoral vote is enormous. The Vice President also enjoys the highest approval ratings among all senior government officials. If elections for the presidency were held today, she would win handily.
Sara’s base of political support is geographically defined. She enjoys overwhelming support among Mindanao voters and holds a commanding lead among voters in the Visayas according to voter preference surveys conducted. She enjoys respectable support among Luzon voters, particularly in the Mega Manila area.
It will be an understatement to say she is a major force in our politics. This explains the tremendous effort and resources needed to undermine her public standing. The impeachment process is only a part of a more comprehensive political project to erode her political standing.
This is not the first time such a political project has been mounted. Nor is it the first time a vice president has become the subject of unremitting political attack.
When Jejomar Binay was vice president, he also led in the voter preference surveys far ahead of the electoral season. He became the target of a brutal demolition campaign, His political standing suffered. He did manage to run for president but lost. A Duterte emerged from the wings and captured the public imagination.
Demolishing Binay was easy. It was entirely a propaganda campaign — not always truthful but emphatic enough.
Destroying Sara as an electoral player requires ousting her from office, banning her from any public post for life and, ultimately, smashing the Duterte political bases of support. This requires the participation of much of the political class, the mobilization of government assets such as its investigative agencies and, presumably, the provision of a vast amount of money. The operatives in this campaign do not come cheap.
It took all of two years to get the articles of impeachment through the House. That alone doubled the amount of political gravy needed to convince a majority of legislators that this was worth doing despite the peril to their own political futures.
The Senate trial, by one estimate, costs taxpayers P25 million per day. This trial could go on until the new year — notwithstanding the prosecution panel’s decision to junk some of its witnesses to speed up the process.
From the very beginning, this trial suffered from lack of public interest. Despite the prosecution panel’s overeager platoon of spokesmen, the proceedings have been a strain on the public’s attention span. Two prosecution spokesmen have been taken to task by the impeachment court for violating prudential rules. This restrains their effort to win the propaganda game by fabricating drama.
The trial itself has been tedious and droning. That will not do to build public enthusiasm for the prospect of the vice president’s removal. Every trial day that passes show increasing signs of exhaustion among the senators and the lawyers.
Ironically, it was the Senate majority’s efforts to bend the law, to alter the Constitution by the meager means of a floor resolution, that aroused some public interest in the proceedings. The majority senators, following linear thinking, imagined reducing the denominator in the final vote might improve their chances of convicting Sara.
The medium is the message. The effort to bend the law in order to reduce the denominator convince the public that the prosecution could not win its case on the basis of evidence. They need to manipulate the voting.
Two senators are already in jail in what many perceive to be an attempt to deflate the denominator. One is in hiding because government will not protect him from an ICC warrant that no one has seen. Another in abroad, ostensibly for medical treatment.
The Ombudsman opened graft investigations against the Villar family, which has two senators in the minority. The same agency also announced investigations into the solar power franchise involving one senator and her son, a congressman. A prosecution spokesman described all these as a “coincidence.” The public does not share that view. All those who have run into legal trouble “coincidentally” belong to the minority.
All the drama over reducing the denominator to compute a two-thirds vote to convict is not idle academic discussion over that the Constitution really means. It is obviously and effort to bring voting thresholds closer to volume of votes the anti-Sara bloc presently controls.
Impeachment is a political process. That is different from saying it should also be a partisan process — although it often is that too. What we are witnessing is an effort to make the procedures conform of the existing partisan lines.
Should the prosecution continue to fail in convincing the public Sara’s guilt approaches impeachable proportions, the lines could change. Some senators currently in the majority could decide to exercise “independence” — which uncannily coincides with political practicality — and vote to acquit.
If this happens, the messy effort to knock Sara off the electoral stage does not only implode. It could backfire so disastrously it tears apart alliances and breaks allegiances built on convenience.
The pro-Marcos majority, it seems, is sitting on a political time bomb that ticks slowly but relentlessly. The “bloodbath” she warned about could be this.