Your Honor, we need to remind you that you cannot have your cake and eat it too. To paraphrase a Quezonian adage, your loyalty to the vice president should end where your fidelity to the duties of a senator judge begins.
With utmost respect to the good and honorable senator from Davao, as a lowly but deeply concerned citizen, and as a taxpayer, I feel it’s both my right and duty to call out a blatant travesty of legal procedures before the impeachment court, even if they call it a "sui generis".
For the first time in all history, as well as totally unprecedented in all the annals of all courts, a judge has jumped the gun on all parties by filing a motion to dismiss. To say that it was irregular is a great understatement. It was a shameless travesty of all forms of propriety and it dishonored the chamber that refused to ignore or even dismiss it outright.
It was entirely perplexing, absolutely annoying, and palpably offensive to the sense of justice and fairness of every decent Filipino. As components of the sovereign Filipino people who ordained and promulgated the 1987 Philippine Constitution, we should all be outraged at such a highly irregular abuse of power. The honorable senator, who belongs to the Duterte bloc, in the Senate should have exercised a little sense of dignity and decency. He should have restrained himself and allowed the lawyers in the Senate to guide him.
The highly irregular and unprecedented move made by senator-judge Ronald Bato de la Rosa, in taking the floor in the Senate impeachment court and orally making a motion to dismiss the articles of impeachment, violated all rules of procedures. It likewise offended all norms of legal and procedural ethics and was a slap to the face of all senses of delicadeza. Many whispered that if Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago were alive that day, she would have raised hell in the halls of the Upper Chamber.
Since the honorable senator from Davao isn’t a member of the Bar, his legal advisers, staff, and his fellow senator-judges who are lawyers should have whispered to him gently and with due respect, that the senator-judges' oath of office relative included a clearly implicit obligation to maintain the highest degree of decorum and manifestation of sobriety, independence of judgment, and appearances of non-partisanship. It has never happened before that a judge has transformed himself into a virtual defense counsel.
By doing precisely what he did, Senator Bato has shown palpable bias in favor of the respondent vice president. And by such blatant display of prejudice against the prosecution, the senator has virtually disqualified himself as judge. He has openly and unabashedly done what the defense counsel should be doing. He jumped the gun on both the prosecution, the defense as well as his peers as senator-judges. He should save his honor by voluntarily inhibiting himself if he believes in the highest principles and values of delicadeza.
We know very well that Senator Bato was one of the four senators who won their senate seats because of the endorsement, support, and assistance of former president Rodrigo Duterte as well as the impeached vice president, Sara Duterte Carpio. Aside from Senators Bong Go, Robinhood Padilla, and outgoing Senator Francis Tolentino, and later Rodante Marcoleta, Senator Bato rose from relative obscurity to national prominence. If he wants to manifest his gratitude to the Dutertes, he should do it with some semblance of finesse and not in such a gross and unabashed travesty.
Just because he got a considerably large chunk of electoral support in the last midterm elections, it didn’t give him the license to abuse the rules of procedures and the seemingly limitless tolerance of the Filipino people. If his peers wanted to help Senator Bato, they should have moved to chastise him, and someone should have moved to delete from the journal of proceedings such a highly-irregular motion.
By deleting such a travesty, the chamber would have been cleansed from a very improper, irregular, and uncalled-for motion. By then, the honor of the Senate would have remained unsullied. But the Senate president has forgotten his UP principles and has joined the Southern confederacy. The SP, who is a brilliant lawyer, has allowed a blatant travesty of the Constitution by a non-lawyer.
In the name of political horse trading, the fundamental law has been desecrated. The people should never forget that in 2028.