Limbo suck

The die has been cast. Sara Duterte has been impeached, and, well, that’s pretty much it!

The judge and jury, our Senate, just went on vacation. They plan to take it up in June when the conclusion will be foregone. If they have the numbers, they will convict her. If they don’t, there might be a half-hearted trial of sorts, some grandstanding, and then she survives.

What a brilliantly-timed move. She is impeached by Congress one day, and then the next day, the Senate, goes on recess. The anti-Duterte camp has just made sure she is stamped with guilt and then rolled all over the excrement of accusations, without the chance to prove her innocence until after the elections. For the next few months, she will be going around branded with the scarlet letter, every newscaster uttering “impeached” and “corruption” in the same breath.

Naturally, she’s reacting as expected. She is defiant, scoffing at her new status as impeached public official; she’s dismissing the gravity of what just happened. She has to. Otherwise, the flock might start thinking she’s done for. What for the reputation she built as a fighter if she doesn’t posture now?

As many pundits have already expressed, the political lives of those identified with her camp, Senators Bong Go and Bato de la Rosa, are now imperiled. They have the votes to flick away any possible conviction, but if they lose their own elections, they will no longer be in the equation. They might soon be replaced with those the administration deems more pliable, willing to vote to put Sara in her desired place, which is nowhere near the presidency.

And so, this election season, while the administration’s sights are trained on these poor re-electionist senators, we can expect their survey ratings to start going down. Go and Bato will start going down like the proverbial rocks (that failed pun nearly worked).

We the public will be conditioned to expect that Go and Bato are steadily losing their campaign, and behind the scenes, multiple strategies are probably being executed to make sure just that very outcome happens. Well, at least, they might still be physically alive, if not politically, after the elections, unlike the strong-arm strategies of other political candidates.

Will the vice president resign? This way, she can avoid the circus. She can side-step the taint of impeachment. She can defiantly proclaim she was never convicted.

That might not be decided until after the midterms, when she can also calculate the numbers. If there’s no super-majority, there’s a bigger chance she will decide to weather the impeachment trial and wait for acquittal. She will stay in her post, and remain a thorn in the side of the administration. She will retain her pulpit to blast fire and brimstone at Liza Marcos and Martin Romualdez, and garner press attention needed to build sufficient momentum for the 2028 presidency.

If, on the other hand, the numbers are there, she may duck out of the trial altogether and resign. She will begin her presidential campaign at a comparative disadvantage, but she might as well go out with a big bang! She will thunder: “I resign!” Then, dramatic stage exit.

In the meantime, it’s a waiting game, for us and her. But it shouldn’t be. I’m surprised we didn’t see a counter-plan unveiled as soon as her impeachment started rolling. She has been voicing her fear of impeachment since last year. Yet, when it happened, all we got was a press conference where she compared impeachment to a bad break-up?

No counter-measures, exposé, or lawsuit? Are we just getting the normalized fire-and-brimstone treatment then? Worse, she backtracked on her assassination language. Now denying she spoke about assassinating the sitting prez. Is this a peace offering? Whitewash the previous outburst by denying it ever happened, and then play submissive?

Or has she learned to play the opposition way, by working in silence, in the background, not showing her cards until it’s time to deal? Is she now already working on individual senators, wooing, cajoling, and (only in a figurative sense) seducing them? Is it time to call in favors from senators who owe the famille? To threaten to expose secrets? To play those tape recording devices? To roll those vids?

This is what happens when you don’t know what comes next. You speculate. The suspense is killing us. And probably, her as well.

The limbo is working, if that’s the case. As I said, brilliantly timed.