Tensions in the impeachment process
The past six days of Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial have produced familiar frustration. The proceedings seem bogged down in objections, repetitive, and distant from the only question that needs to be answered: Is she fit to hold office?
Some advocacy groups and commentators have called on the Senate to move faster, to focus on substance, and stop being distracted by “technicalities more appropriate to ordinary judicial proceedings.” The impatience is understandable. But it rests on a misreading of what the Constitution created.
The tensions we are witnessing are not signs of failure. They are inherent in the constitutional design itself. The Constitution did not create a system meant to function seamlessly; it created one with contradiction at its core. Understanding this will not resolve the tension, but it may change what we think we are watching.
Article XI gives the Senate an almost impossible instruction: “the sole power to try and decide all cases of impeachment.” “Try” is legal language; it means examine carefully, test claims through evidence and cross-examination, distinguish what is proven from what is alleged. “Decide” in this context is political language: it calls on senators rather than on an impartial judge to render binding judgment.
The grounds for impeachment and the prescribed penalty reveal the hybrid nature of impeachment: treason, bribery, and graft are legal categories. But “betrayal of public trust” is fundamentally political. It need not involve a crime; it only asks whether an official can still be trusted.
Article XI, Section 5 limits the Senate’s judgment to removal and disqualification—a purely political remedy, not criminal punishment.
In essence, the Constitution told the Senate: determine political fitness through legal procedure. We are watching what happens when the Senate tries to do this.
The collision is not between good people and bad. It is between two coherent but incompatible ways of knowing what counts as proof of unfitness. The prosecution (a mix of lawyers and politicians) says: the facts clearly show unfitness. These are political facts; they are about judgment, leadership, trustworthiness. Legal procedure in the form of detailed objections and endless clarification can obscure rather than sharpen these facts.
The defense (private counsel) says: that is precisely why you need law. Before political alignment is translated into judgment, we must be rigorous about what we actually know. We must distinguish between what is proven and what is assumed, between sound inference and convenient conclusion. The objections and qualifications are the means by which truth becomes distinguishable from mere political interest.
Here lies a crucial distinction. The private lawyers on both sides share something: they occupy the same communicative space. They understand that litigation is inherently tedious and will not try to short-circuit it. It is the political figures among the prosecutors and the senator-judges who feel the weight of time. They sense the essentially political nature of the process and view courtroom procedure as secondary. Understandably, they want to cut to the chase.
Both are right. Both are responding to mandates the Constitution itself created. The call to abandon procedure for substance assumes that the constitutionally mandated coupling of law and politics in the impeachment process can easily be disentangled. We are seeing that it cannot.
The legal apparatus, through lawyers’ objections, protects against sheer political power dressed as judgment. On the other hand, the judgment rendered by senator-judges who are inescapably constrained by political alignment and interest, ensures that the decision is binding and reflects reality as it exists. Take away either, and you sacrifice accountability. The tediousness is the price we pay to maintain both checks simultaneously.
The tensions visible in these six days are therefore not signs of confusion or ignorance. They are the Constitution’s design working as intended, i.e. at the intersection of law and politics, where accountability actually resides.
The friction we are witnessing is what accountability looks like when it must be both legally rigorous and politically binding. We must be watchful, but we also need to be patient.
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