Too late
At the resumption of their session last Monday, June 2, senators debated what to do with the impeachment case against Vice President Sara Duterte. The House of Representatives had transmitted the articles of impeachment to the Senate just before Congress adjourned in early February to make way for the midterm elections.
That was three months ago. Since then, the elections have changed the composition of the legislature. Some senators who ran failed to get reelected. Their terms end on June 30. A new batch of legislators will assume office on July 1, marking the beginning of the 20th Congress.
By Sen. Francis Tolentino’s reckoning, the old Senate—the 19th Congress—has run out of time. If it were to constitute itself as an impeachment court now, it would be starting a process it can no longer complete. And if one assumes that the incoming Senate is an entirely different body, then its members would not be in a position to continue what their predecessors had begun. The case, Tolentino argues, must be refiled—like a bill that failed to become law.
Concluding his legal disquisition, Tolentino declared the case “functionally dismissed.”
That phrase caught my ear. As far as I know, it is not a recognized legal concept. He could only have meant it in a sociological sense—or something close to it. That is, the case is not dismissed by reason of law, but as a consequence of timing and political inertia. It simply expires.
In the language of the social sciences, a “function” is the objective consequence of a set of actions or operations. If the consequences are intended or expected, they are called “manifest functions.” If they are unintended or unacknowledged, they are “latent functions.” Functional analysis is particularly concerned with the latter, for they often reveal how systems sustain or sabotage themselves in ways unanticipated by their actors.
Consequences that help a system survive or maintain order are deemed “functional.” Those that threaten its stability or generate further problems are “dysfunctional.” Of course, what is functional from the standpoint of one system—say, politics—may be dysfunctional from the standpoint of another—like law.
That, I think, is precisely where we are now. The nation is reaping the latent consequences of decisions made in the realm of politics, consequences that are testing both the integrity of the legal system and the legitimacy of the political system.
When Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. teamed up with Sara Duterte for the 2022 presidential election, he surely understood the political debt he was incurring. Former president Rodrigo Duterte had wanted his daughter to run for president. He did not think highly of the Marcos scion and was not keen on seeing her settle for the vice presidency in a Marcos-led tandem.
There may have been no formal agreement between the Marcoses and the Dutertes, but the outlines of their arrangement can be inferred. At the very least, it likely involved two key pledges: first, to support Sara Duterte’s eventual run for the presidency in 2028; and second, to protect her father, Rodrigo Duterte, from prosecution—especially by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
In the early days of his presidency, Mr. Marcos appeared to honor this alliance. He reiterated his refusal to cooperate with the ICC. He appointed Sara Duterte as Secretary of Education, despite her lack of experience in the field. He even shared confidential and intelligence funds from his own office with hers in their first year in office.
But the alliance was not built to last. It began to fray, and it collapsed altogether when Sara Duterte resigned from the Cabinet. What followed was open political hostility. The Marcos administration began targeting known Duterte allies, using the powers of Congress and law enforcement to investigate and paralyze them.
Eventually, the scrutiny reached the Vice President herself—and the former president. Congressional hearings, aired live on national television, fed a narrative of accountability that gripped the public like a political telenovela. These were no longer just partisan skirmishes. They began to produce outcomes with real legal implications. Seen in this light, these political events “functionally” prepared the nation for two dramatic developments: the arrest and surrender of Rodrigo Duterte to the ICC for crimes against humanity, and the filing of impeachment charges against Vice President Duterte.
Having seen this sequence unfold, the public now seeks closure. And that, I believe, is where the phrase “functionally dismissed” becomes problematic. If anything is truly too late to accomplish, it is not the trial of the Vice President—but the pretense that none of this happened.
