Lords of the realm
November 5th, 2003
One of the great lessons the 2000-2001 impeachment trial of then President Joseph Estrada imparted was that impeachment is basically political, and that whoever’s in control will determine how it begins and ends.
Of course there are all those rules that supposedly guarantee due process: how an impeachment complaint is initiated and heard in the House, and then transmitted to the Senate, where the trial itself is governed by existing rules of evidence and testimony as well as others the senator-judges may reasonably devise.
However, it all depends on having both the numbers as well as the power. When the impeachment complaint against Estrada was submitted to the House, the majority view was that it would not prosper. The pro-Estrada forces were after all in control of that chamber, and getting the required one-third of the congressmen to sign the complaint for transmittal would take a miracle of sorts.
The pro-impeachment congressmen had done their homework, however, and had managed to win over enough congressmen to enable then Speaker Manuel Villar to ram the complaint through by quickly suspending sessions before it could be debated at the plenary level.
Though transmitted to the Senate, which is constitutionally bound to hold the trial, the impeachment process soon foundered on the numbers commanded by the pro-Estrada faction. The collapse of the Estrada impeachment trial triggered the 2001 crisis that till today continues to haunt the nation and its government’s institutions, among them the presidency and the Supreme Court.
That impeachment is a political process does not detract from the need for it to be at least reasonable to begin with, and based on what the Constitution allows. The impeachment complaint against Chief Justice Hilario Davide is based on his alleged “misappropriation” of the Judicial Development Fund (JDF) by supposedly not allocating 80 percent of that fund to the Cost of Living Allowances of judiciary employees and spending millions on cars, curtains, chairs and other facilities. The Commission on Audit (COA), however, has found nothing wrong in Davide’s handling of the Fund, and has said so in a report.
Under Philippine law, the only agency that can audit the Supreme Court is the Commission on Audit, which at least theoretically is an independent institution presumably free from the pressures of partisan politics. But the instigators of the Davide impeachment nevertheless claim that the House has oversight rights into the way the judiciary manages its Funds. Assuming that claim to be correct—and Davide has said in so many words that it isn’t because it would undermine the court’s fiscal independence—one might well ask if impeachment is the House’s way of exercising that oversight.
By saying yes in so many words, the instigators of the Davide impeachment are also saying that Davide has been impeached because they say he has to be. This is to do away with all the rules of reason and due process altogether. Already a political process to start with, the House would make impeachment blatantly political by divesting it of the pretence that, political it may be, it does still subscribe to certain rules.
This is the same formula for crisis that was unintentionally used by the 11 senators during the Estrada impeachment when they voted against the opening of the second envelope. By doing so, those senators too said that it was all a matter of numbers and power, let the rules be damned.
This is what the entire country is witnessing today—the casting aside of their own rules, when it’s convenient, by the very institutions that devised them.
Listen to President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, for example, who ten days ago was all statesmanlike in proclaiming the neutrality of her office in the legislative-judicial impasse, who materialized a week ago at the Monday flag-raising rites at the Supreme Court, and who as the week ended, was asking for a “settlement” of the crisis via her intervention.
Arroyo the President was correct when she proclaimed the Presidency’s neutrality. That is exactly according to the rules, which say, among others, that the three branches of government are co-equal. The reason for the present crisis lies precisely in the equality between Congress and the Supreme Court, in which one is not the subordinate of the other.
Arroyo the politician sees it differently, however. Besieged on all sides by accusations that she either colluded with her allies in the House or kept silent as the crisis was being stoked by Fuentebella et.al, and by fears of a new round of military adventurism, she has attempted to seize the high ground by proposing a political solution to the crisis.
But for Congress and the Court to “meet halfway” as Mrs. Arroyo suggests, is to imply the surrender by either, or both, of some of that equality. The likelihood, of course, is that any political solution will demand much more of the Supreme Court than of the House.
This is probably why Chief Justice Davide said that whatever “covenant” is reached as a result of Mrs. Arroyo’s mediation must work towards “strengthening the role of each of the three branches of government,” and not towards a political solution likely to weaken an already damaged Supreme Court.
The only solution to the present crisis is for the House to withdraw the impeachment complaint, or failing that (and it does seem unlikely, Davide and the Court having provoked the latent arrogance of the lords of the realm), for the Senate to receive it, and then dismiss it for its obvious lack of merit.
A political solution brokered by Mrs. Arroyo will enable her to have her cake and eat it, too. On the one hand, she need not unduly stretch her capacity for principled action by standing with the Supreme Court on this issue, and in the process antagonize her allies in the House as well as the interests driving them. On the other, she would be seen by those who fear a full-blown crisis as having stepped into the breach just in time to prevent it—as well as incidentally regaining the faith of those groups, individuals and institutions that have circled the wagons around Davide in his hour of need.
Unfortunately for Mrs. Arroyo, no one seems to be paying her any mind. While she has acted true to form in assuming that any rule can be compromised and any law bent so long as it’s among us friends in the governing circles of the Philippine hell, she has so compromised her own credibility that no one is likely—certainly not Davide—to take her suggestion seriously.
Let us then assume that Davide will not allow a political solution to the crisis the House has created. Let us assume further that he doesn’t deserve impeachment on the basis of his supposed mismanagement of the JDF, and that should the complaint be transmitted to the Senate, that body will throw it out as errant nonsense.
But once the crisis is over, would it nevertheless be possible to ask His Honor, Chief Justice Davide, to pretty please explain how he was able to spend P5.5 million for curtains, if indeed he did? While we’re at it, did those chairs for the Supreme Court really cost P120,000 each? And do the justices really need those Toyota Camrys? Have they been so reduced to penury they’ve been walking home or taking cabs to work?
Davide may not be impeachable for purchasing curtains, cars and chairs. But he should certainly be accountable to the highest court of all, the sovereign people, who have a right to answers to at least some of these questions. Otherwise, he would be worse than the lords of the realm in House, who, theoretically at least, can be voted out of office.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, November 4, 2003)