‘Arreglado na ang kilay!’
A reader rewarded my wish to revive this prewar bit of slang by responding to my posting of a picture of Senate President Francis Escudero taking his oath as presiding officer of the impeachment court together with the late Senator Claro M. Recto’s famous remark, “Tapos na ang boksing.” To my delight, the reader responded with that Commonwealth-era expression, “Arreglado na ang kilay!” What a nice caption for the Senate President’s oath-taking shot.
Eighty years to the day after the first nationally elected Senate finally convened in 1945 (after being elected in November 1941, but unable to assume office because of the outbreak of the war), its present-day heir finally came to its collective senses. It was unnecessarily weeks in the making. The Senate had launched a barrage of trial balloons to try to wriggle out of mounting an impeachment trial—or, at the very least, to get a firmer sense of where public opinion actually lay. Monday night’s session revealed that the answer was: the public wanted a trial to proceed in the manner intended by the Constitution, “forthwith” or “agad-agad,” as the author of the terms, former Justice Adolfo Azcuna Jr., helpfully pointed out.
It was enough to leave Sen. Risa Hontiveros not alone at last, but rather in the company of a senator whose swan song—as he bows out of his term—restored his standing: Sen. Aquilino Pimentel III moved that the articles of impeachment submitted by the House be referred to the committee on justice and human rights of the Senate and that the Senate President in turn, take his oath as presiding officer of the impeachment court, and so on. All of this had been preceded not only by a flood of manifestos from concerned academic institutions and civil society but also snapshots of public opinion supportive of a trial; most of all, by the kind of intensity of social media opinion that leaves everyone who encounters it sure that the public has made itself heard.
This was in marked contrast to the voices raised in defense of the Veep: if they’d spoken during the elections, they remained relatively quiet afterward. The only thing quieter than them was the President. If, as everyone seems to agree, the Dutertes don’t take prisoners, then—politically at least (to put it mildly)—the President is a dead man walking.
To review: aside from the Marcos-Duterte tie-in the midterm Senate election, the lack of any clear (public, anyway) indication of where the Palace wanted things to go also fostered senatorial indecision. With all eyes turned to him, the President responded yesterday by answering a reporter’s question (should the impeachment cross over from the 19th Congress to the 20th?) in his typical understated style: “What’s the controversy? It’s obvious that it will.” Chances are, politicians and observers both will leap to the conclusion that this is nothing less than a green light after weeks and weeks of looking toward the Palace for signs of administration resolve to pursue the case.
It fortifies the belief that challenging the trial on the theory that it somehow evaporates between the gaveling into the history of the 19th Congress and the convening of the 20th is such laughably bad law that only non-lawyers dare to even propose it.
So between now and Wednesday, when the senators all take their oaths as senator-judges, where lies a miracle for the Veep? There are, arguably, three arguments her sympathizers can make either in the Senate or before the Supreme Court: the articles of impeachment are defective because: 1. The one-per-year rule was violated because three earlier complaints were archived, arguably making the impeachment the fourth (but they were never disposed of by the House, so never even taken up; never even existed, legislatively speaking); 2. There wasn’t enough vetting by the House committee on justice, which ignores the Constitution’s own fast-track provisions, which enable articles to go straight through to plenary once a threshold of endorsers is met; 3. There was some sort of flaw in the verification of signatures, on the basis that some signed without understanding what they endorsed.
In the words of an experienced lawyer, these objections are “hogwash!” But invoking such tactics has never been about the actual merits; it’s about buying time. It could bog down the proceedings in the Senate before it adjourns or paralyze the process if the Supreme Court accepts a challenge to the proceedings in the Senate. But once constituted as an impeachment court, the proceedings will take on a life of their own. It will be an exercise in which from the moment evidence begins to be revealed by the prosecution, the damage will already have been done, regardless of the verdict. It is a political process, after all. For every senator who is actually more a senator-juror than senator-judge, there are tens of millions of Filipinos empowered to be something they can never be otherwise: jurors in the court of public opinion.
