One benefit of hailing from a country with a parliamentary system is that one’s immune to the drama of impeachment. If a prime minister is a criminal or unloved, the ruling party simply quorums a vote amongst its members and finds a new leader. (My own country has trialed four premiers in as many years.) Parliament isn’t required to intervene, nor are the courts, and the public feels a little less cheated after being reminded that one votes for a party, not the party’s leader.
Pity, then, the Filipino who will have to endure months of denunciation and counter-accusation. On Wednesday, Vice President Sara Duterte was impeached by the House of Representatives, although a ruling decision must come from the Senate, which isn’t sitting until June and which is more friendly to the vice president. So we will have months of speculation, leaks and slander until a decision is reached (or not), and this period overlaps with important midterm elections due in May. (Twelve of the Senate’s 24 seats are up for grabs, and those standing will be expected to give their opinion on the matter.)
I cannot tell if the case against Sara Duterte is strong or not. She is on record saying that she ordered someone to kill President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his family if she herself was assassinated. She has also said she wants to dig up the body of Marcos’s father and dump it in the sea. There are also, more importantly, allegations of corruption and misuse of funds when she was education secretary. (She resigned from that post in June.)
Then again, some of the condemnations include her allegedly failing to stand up to Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, which is a policy dispute at best. If convicted by two-thirds of the Senate, she will be removed from office and disqualified from holding any public post, killing her mooted 2028 presidential bid. But her supporters, mostly the loyalists of her father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, argue that all of this is a trumped-up vendetta by the sitting president who thinks it is no longer necessary to tolerate the Duterte clan, as he had to do at the 2022 presidential election. Sara’s brother, Paolo Duterte, a congressman, called it “a clear act of political persecution.”
President Marcos himself has publicly said he opposes impeachment, although his cousin, Martin Romualdez, speaker of the House of Representatives, and his son, Alexander Marcos, a congressman, led the charge for it. It may be, as Romualdez asserted, that this case is solely about “upholding the Constitution and ensuring that no public official, regardless of their position, is above the law,” yet the problem of dynastic politics is that it makes allegations of familial connivance impossible to refute. (There are many other bad things to be said about dynastic politics, but another is that it means a journalist is almost incapable of writing well. One cannot report on Philippine politics these days without lacing one’s copy with family trees and so many unwieldy asides that it resembles the opus of a French philosopher.)
That said, the claim that this is simply “politically motivated” somewhat misses the point. Impeachment, after all, is a political process, not a legal one, as we were constantly informed during Donald Trump’s impeachment hearings. Unless one is so ignorant about the grittiness of politics and so naive to think that politicians don’t act out of self-advancement or party allegiance, it is difficult to imagine an impeachment proceeding that isn’t “politically motivated.”
One naturally feels things would be better if the procedure was reversed. If Sara Duterte has committed a crime, she deserves to have her day in court (an actual court, and not the Senate.) Yet to bring her to the dock, her apparent immunity must first be stripped away. Whether this is actually the case has been debated since last year. In November, Department of Justice Undersecretary Jesse Hermogenes Andres argued that a vice president has no immunity and that Duterte could be brought to trial without first being impeached.
However, other legal experts assert that a vice president does enjoy immunity. I’m informed that while there is no explicit provision for the vice president in the Constitution, the Supreme Court did uphold presidential immunity in 2021, so it would be odd for this not to extend to the vice president. The answer to this question essentially turns on one’s opinion about how much power a vice president holds, which is a rather arbitrary matter and suggests an unwelcome admission about who should be above the law.
This is one of those debates that ought to be resolved sooner rather than later, and it is disappointing that the powers that be decided against experimenting with it in Sara Duterte’s case. Wouldn’t it be far better for Philippine democracy for a senior politician’s guilt to be decided in a court of law before removing them from the political arena for good? (The more serious allegation against Duterte is of corruption and misuse of funds, not her rantings about executing the president.) At least to me, a courts-first-and-parliament-second approach would reduce the chances of politics descending into retaliatory lawfare (as Duterte’s supporters have threatened) and would negate many of the reasons for presidential immunity in the first place. Moreover, it would dampen (although not silence) the chorus chanting that impeachment is purely “politically motivated” and might go some way to forcing voters to think a little more about the character of the people they vote for.
The excitement over the House’s decision this week is unlikely to simmer down, although Philippine politics could do with moving on from the personal spats between the Marcos clan and the Dutertes. The comradeship between the two families in 2021-22 has become an amicicidal drama that needs axing. Yet, the impeachment spectacle may provide an opportunity to dismantle the political influence of groups like Iglesia Ni Cristo, an influential religious sect that apparently marshaled a million protestors for a pro-Duterte rally this month. Perhaps it would allow Marcos to finally accept the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Rodrigo Duterte. Better still, for him to stand trial inside the Philippines.
I’m not one of those who condemns polarization. Indeed, the Philippines’ political parties could do with a little more division over policies and a little less of the spirit of bipartisanship over economic matters. A party that actually represents the interests of the poor would be much welcomed, certainly at a time when almost all parties conspire to fob them off with never-to-be-kept promises and then sidle up to oligarchs. Yet some common decency is needed, and perhaps Sara Duterte’s impeachment would serve pour encourager les autres.
