Now or never? For whom?

She has crossed her Rubicon. By taking a firm position that she will not make any comment on the alleged Garci tapes, much less deign to appear before the five House committees that will start hearings on the tapes this Tuesday, President GMA has drawn the line in the sand.

She has taken the advice of those who are telling her that stonewalling is the best option and that she does not have to risk self-incrimination by any statement which locks her into any position on the authenticity or alteration of the tapes. Any such position, they argue, would be fraught with legal and political risks. Her recent claims of economic gains shows that she thinks she can weather this storm by pounding on a Clintonesque theme of "It’s the economy, stupid!"

The five House committees that will proceed with their inquiry – Public Information, Public Order and Safety, Defense and Security, Communications and Technology, and Suffrage – have also reached their own point of no return. By summoning everyone who’s claimed possession of an "original" or "mother" of the tapes and by formally asking the President to comment on the tapes, they have signaled that the hearings will proceed towards a conclusion of some kind. That conclusion can be nothing else than a report on the authenticity of the tapes and the identity of the persons whose voices appear to be on the tapes.

No one has any illusions about where the House hearings are headed for. While the initial rationale is that the process is in aid of legislation, it is clear that the opposition, and perhaps some members of the majority who may feel conscience-stricken, are simply waiting for an opportunity to find any basis for an impeachment complaint. In discussions with members of the committees, both majority and minority, many of them tell us that if it is found that the voices on the tape are those of the President and then Commission on Elections Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano, it’s curtains for the GMA presidency.

That apocalyptic view, however, is not accepted by GMA supporters. Although, as head of a Constitutional Commission he is legally bound to be independent of other branches of government, Comelec Chair Benjamin Abalos maintains that there is a second part of the inquiry, which is to determine whether, assuming that the voices are those of GMA and Garci, their conversation involved anything illegal, improper or immoral.

The Abalos stance, of course, is premised on the opinion that a mere conversation between a candidate and a Comelec official is not necessarily wrong, if nothing illegal is discussed. Candidates access Comelec officials all the time, he says, as an act of prudence to ensure that their votes are protected. Others would assert, however, that any conversation between a sitting President who is also a candidate and an election official whom she herself appointed is per se illegal and unethical.

The latter position also holds that such conversations can be nothing else but illegal. Moreover, the double-talk and innuendo merely prove the sociological theory that whenever people are talking about something illicit, they are never explicit and leave much unsaid although both parties know exactly what each is expected to do. In other words, an order to mount a fraudulent exercise can be given even when it sounds like the conversation was about nothing more than the weather.

For my part, I read the President’s deliberate stonewalling as an acceptance of the suggestion of some advisers that the proceedings in the House – and indeed the entire legal debate on whether the tapes are authentic but the product of wiretapping, altered or the work of an evil digital genius – can be steered towards an effective stalemate.

By presenting "findings" of experts favorable to the President, by muddling up the legal issues – and we all know there will always be lawyers that can argue both sides of a legal issue to death, and sound both erudite and sincere in the process – the administration’s gamble is that she will be able to keep the tape issue hanging and divert public attention to the "good" things she is doing for the economy.

At the same time, simply by availing of "due process" rights to the hilt, any jueteng cases that the Senate recommends for filing, or that Ombudsman eventually files, will inevitably take years to wind their way through the courts. Thus, time can be bought during which, to save her presidency, GMA might implement those "profound changes" and take the "decisive action" urged by everyone and his uncle, from her friends in the business community to die-hard adherents.

But this is exactly what worries me. It seems to me to be a deliberate choice of a Damocles Sword to be kept dangling over this country for the five-year balance of her term. And you know what they say about the real danger of the Damocles Sword: Not that it falls, but that it hangs… and hangs!

The real question is whether GMA can govern until 2010 if closure is not achieved on the tape issue, this more than the jueteng controversy. As many have noted, jueteng involves corruption and the charges against the members of the family which she can arguably meet by throwing all the identified culprits, even those in her family, to the dogs.

The tape issue is of an entirely different species. It goes to the legitimacy of her mandate. It raises the question of whether she truly respects the sanctity of the electoral process, one of the most fundamental elements of our fragile democracy, or whether she, like any other trapo, will desecrate it in order to win at any cost. Just by opening up the tape issue, many believe, her presidency has already been irreparably damaged.

Most of our people will not wait indefinitely for that issue to be resolved. They will not stand for a side-tracking or downplaying of the issue, regardless of doubts about potential successors or dangers to the economy. On balance, her decision to stonewall is the wrong one, and will haunt her remaining years in the presidency.