No way to impeach P-Noy

The minority will only waste its time if it pursues an impeachment case against President Aquino. Firstly, it does not have the required majority of representatives to even approved a report in the committee level to impeach the president. Secondly, it cannot muster at least one-third of the members of the House to sign an article of impeachment for automatic referral to the Senate for trial. And thirdly, there appears no valid grounds to excite the public to cause the president’s impeachment.

Thus, the minority should think twice before embarking on such a very difficult task of filing an impeachment case against President Aquino. And the more impeachment cases are filed against him, the more chances that no impeachment case would prosper in a given year because of the constitutional provision that an impeachment case cannot be initiated against the same official more than once within a period of one year.

In other words, while the minority may have all the legal rights to initiate an impeachment case against President Aquino, it is politically wrong to push it through at this time. The members of the minority bloc should learn from their lesson in the past when, once upon a time, they were in the majority who, like the present majority in the House of Representatives, could successfully block any attempt to impeach the president.

As former President Erap Estrada put it: “Weather Weather lang ‘yan.” — Atty. ROMULO B. MACALINTAL, Independent Impeachment Analyst, Las Piñas City