Plus two minutes

Pierre Trudeau, father of Canada’s current prime minister, famously observed, “The essential ingredient of politics is timing.” Since impeachment has equally famously (or notoriously) been described as a “political process,” it goes to say that timing, in terms of an impeachment, is everything. That’s because while the rules may decree that senators are essentially the jury in an impeachment, what an impeachment really is, isn’t a procedure in a court of law, but rather, an exercise in the court of public opinion.

Timing is the dilemma faced not just by the President, the Speaker, and their coalition; it is also one faced by the coalition around the Vice President and the one surrounding her father, the ex-president (they are not one and the same). Suffice it to say, if the Marcos-Romualdez political style is to be like a boa constrictor—strangulation, slowly but surely—then the Duterte method is to be like a silverback gorilla, where violent displays are both deterrent and your actual core competency. One needs time; the other has to cut time short. The past few weeks have seen the ex-president and the Veep trying to accelerate the political timeline, so it comes to a head before or during the midterms, so they still have a fighting chance. Until recently, they’d been losing out as both the Senate (barely competently) and the House (methodically and effectively) coiled around the Dutertes and slowly but surely started to put the squeeze on formerly loyal subordinates.

With more than a little help from his friends in the Senate, and then by means of their trademark charge first, make sense later style, the Dutertes made such a scene that it accelerated the timetable for events: cases had to be filed in light of the Veep’s threats and the President had to speak, because there are some provocations that simply can’t be ignored. This meant though that things couldn’t stay on the slow track. Which the point everyone was at, when a message for congressmen was leaked and the President admitted it was his: adding, in his now-trademark style, that the message of the day is don’t worry, be happy, the Veep is unimportant anyway.

And it worked. Instead of being able to point to a lynch mob, the best the Veep could do was point to … well, thin air. She could have pointed at the many cases filed or being prepared to be filed, and which she will have to address, but she didn’t. The President regained control of the clock.

This battle over time itself presents its own dilemma to other political groups not eager, because fundamentally incompatible, to be identified with these two larger sides. There is, on one hand, the extreme left Makabayan coalition, and on the other, the remains of the old Center coalition color-coded as Yellow and the more moderate Left aligned with the 2022 Pinks. For the extreme Left and the Center-Left, since both want both sides of the 2022 ruling coalition destroyed, the dilemma is, do you play ball on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, or do you stand back, or step aside, and wish them all ill?

The President’s signaling a “time out,” one argument goes, reveals the Marcos-Romualdez coalition’s caught on the horns of this dilemma: whether impeachment is even necessary to fatally weaken the chances of the Veep by 2028; or, if impeachment is necessary, when can it be successfully accomplished—before or after the midterms? The Duterte coalition’s own dilemma is whether it should now engage in performative martyrdom to gain public sympathy or continue to take the fight to its foes on the principle that the best defense is a good offense.

As befits a faith that believes it is an intellectual movement, the radical Left has always taken a cue from Lenin and welcomed alliances of convenience with those it later condemns (and executes) as “useful idiots.” Its weakness then, is being too clever for its own good. On the other hand, as befits a movement that tries to turn every political exercise into an opportunity for engaging in spiritual exercises, the Center-Left believes it brings moral clarity to politics only to discover that clarity is hard to achieve, and that politics is not won by the sanctimonious but by the practical and the ruthless.

In other words, Makabayan from the start played ball with Romualdez, only to be deprived of the ball when it thought it was about to make a three-point shot. Makabayan cried foul at the time-out since it lost and the initiative was denied a deserved distinction of being the group that actually filed the impeachment complaint.

It was the side all sides despise, the Yellows and the Pinks, who did what no one was willing to do, which is actually file a complaint. Now the boa has to speed up its strangulation—or let go—and the gorilla has no choice but to prepare to sit in the dock because its allies can no longer file a self-impeachment. Front and center is what impeachment’s supposed to be about, something everyone else dislikes: accountability.

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Email: mlquezon3@gmail.com; Twitter: @mlq3