[OPINION | NEWSPOINT] A last stand for national redemption

Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno has never doubted she would be impeached. And neither has everyone else in a nation polarized between those who cheer her impeachment and those who protest it – between those blinded, charmed, or otherwise fooled by Rodrigo Duterte and those clear-eyed enough to see through him and his authoritarian designs. 

In fact, even before Sereno can be declared officially impeached, by a House of Representatives dominated by Duterte through its 90-percent-plus majority, her trial, by a Senate constituted as a court of law, has been more or less set – for July. 

She is a prime target, to be sure, but not an isolated one. A plot to hog power necessarily involves multiple targets and a large, collusive effort, and this one is driven by interlocking political interests – and vengeance, too. The first prime target was Senator Leila de Lima.

As chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights, De Lima had begun investigating Duterte when he was mayor of Davao City, for allegations that he presided over death-squad murders. And, when she became senator and he president, she pressed on. At one hearing she mounted, a confessed assassin for Duterte testified he had ordered her killed.

Duterte and his men came back at her by collecting convicts serving life terms for trafficking in illegal drugs and getting them to testify that she had been complicit with them. Solely on their word, without so much as a gram of illegal drugs or a cent of drug money for concrete evidence, she was detained to await trial on charges that, apparently to make them less incredible, were later changed – from the unprovable illegal drug trading to the still nebulous conspiracy to commit that crime. She has been in jail for over a year now.

Duterte was not the only one whose vengeful wrath De Lima provoked. There, too, was former president Gloria Arroyo. As secretary of justice to President Benigno Aquino III, successor to Arroyo, De Lima stopped her as she tried to flee the country and escape a charge of plunder, a crime for which no bail is allowed. In the campaign for the May 2016 elections, candidate Duterte called for Arroyo’s release from detention, and two months later, upon his accession to the presidency, she won both freedom and acquittal – thanks not only to a friendly president but also to a Supreme Court dominated by her own appointees. She is now deputy speaker and a principal Duterte ally. 

Aquino himself is being dragged to hearings for allegations of graft. It does not help that he was De Lima’s and Sereno’s nominator – and they his nominees – but the more likely intent is to discredit the benchmark his presidency set. He in fact left Duterte more than a trillion pesos in the treasury, but, with nothing to show for it, he has had to manufacture pretexts that would portray his predecessor as neglectful, corrupt, and inept.  

But the portrayal only makes a spectacular mockery of the facts: Aquino’s presidency posted the highest average growth rate, the sharpest decline in poverty incidence, and the highest sense of security against crime. But then, again, the confessed dictator and certified narcissist that he is, Duterte cares none about facts that don’t advance his wishes.

Strategically, Sereno herself doesn’t seem a worthy pick. Duterte obviously felt affronted when she held him off as he tried to cross into her domain and meddle with her judges, but impeachment does not seem a sanction proportionate at all to the affront, or to her potential as an obstructionist. 

As a minority chief justice going against a tide of voting that favored Duterte’s interests, Sereno could have been left untouched safely. If the intention was to please the friendly magistrates by feeding their resentment toward a chief so young she frustrated their ambition to rise to her position, it might seem a worthwhile effort toward power consolidation. But, if the intention was for her to serve as a distraction while Duterte and his accomplices did whatever they felt they needed to do unobstructed to perpetuate themselves in power – constitutional change, federalization, plotting with China – they could be fatally mistaken. 

Sereno’s trial promises in fact to be the preoccupation, not the distraction. Impeachment, especially in the arbitrary way in which it was conducted, is nothing at all like a trial, and the Lower House, if only by tradition, is nothing like the Senate.

As chief impeacher, being chairman of the House committee on justice, Reynaldo Umali was the perfect Duterte flunky: He made sure not a word got in for Sereno; he did not even allow her lawyers to answer or question her detractors, who, precisely because they were indulged, went to town, and ended up sounding petty. The hearings were so one-sided they resembled an airing of gripes. 

The Senate does have its own stray flunkies but, since its members are installed on a national vote, thus less susceptible to the habits of patronage than the House, whose own members are voted by district, it has built a tradition of high-mindedness.

That’s why Sereno can’t wait to go to trial. 

And that’s also why Umali, the designated chief prosecutor, is keen to dodge it. With false bravado, he advises Sereno to resign, or else face summary action declaring her unqualified to be chief justice.

As impressive as the ultimatum may sound – quo warranto in the books of law – it is cowardly, desperate, and ridiculous in its present application: after recognizing Sereno tacitly, by impeaching her, as the certified chief justice, his impeachers are now saying she was after all not qualified, from the very start, to be chief justice and, therefore, should never have been impeached. 

But shame being the last thing to stop the Duterte regime, its single-minded shameless intent is to send Sereno’s case to its co-opted Supreme Court, bypassing the Senate, robbing it of its exclusive constitutional mandate to decide impeachments.

That puts an even more fateful burden on the Senate than do all its great traditions put together: It is called upon to make a stand for truth, freedom, and justice, indeed for the nation’s redemption – a stand not improbably the last of such not only in its turn but in this generation and the next, perhaps for even longer.

The Senate cannot default. – Rappler.com