Choosing your battles

If the hearings of the House Committee on Justice have been, to most observers, an embarrassing demonstration of the essential vacuity of blabophiliac legislators, the congressmen have only themselves to blame. More people are now joining Agusan Rep. Ompong Plaza in asking his famous question "What kind of Congress is this?"

When both sides of the aisle erupted in cheers at the adoption of the 11th Congress impeachment rules to govern GMA’s case, we expressed our puzzlement several times in this space. We thought then that if the majority wanted to, the rules allowed it to take up to sixty session days, or up to five calendar months, to come up with a finding of sufficiency of form and substance of the impeachment complaint.

This was, of course, assuming that the Justice Committee worked throughout the current maximum of three session days per week, with no legislative recess or unscheduled breaks in between, including for All Souls’ Day and the entire Christmas holiday. If any sessions are cancelled, the five months could drag on much longer.

The opposition congressmen are antsy over so-called "technicalities," from the impartiality of the chairman, to which complaint will be examined by the Committee, to the time it will take for the Senate trial to begin. They want to submit evidence pronto because the 79 signatures needed to override a negative finding by the committee are supposedly contingent on the submission of evidence that will convince the fence-sitters to make their own historic, if belated, leaps of faith.

Now the minority knows why "those guys on the other side" were jumping for joy at the approval of the rules. Aghast as the public continues to be at the cacophonous shouting matches on the floor – one is hard put to call them debates – the stark reality is that both sides are frothing at the mouth over the minutiae of ambiguous, or in some cases, inapplicable legal doctrines and procedural niceties. But the argument continues to be over "rules" which both sides approved con mucho gusto.

The time for quarreling over the rules is over. Now that the process has begun, it must perforce be governed by those rules. If the point is that that process isn’t speedy enough, or is too allegedly vulnerable to lengthy disputations over irrelevancies, well, the good congressmen should have provided for remedies to those defects.

On the other hand, if the proceedings at the Committee on Justice are thought to be a totally useless exercise and that the real action ought to be the trial at the Senate, there are two sides to this coin. Under the Constitution and, again, those rules, a process must be followed. There is no exception for impatient, even morally self-assured, legislators, no matter how strident or stentorian of voice, who feel it in the public interest to abbreviate or short-cut the process. That is an inconvenient, but nonetheless undeniable, fact of life here.

But if the minority wunkerkinds – that’s a compliment, guys – are really reiterating the bromide that impeachment is a political exercise, not a legal process, then my question is what the hell are you doing in the Session Hall (the "soul" of the House, according to a fellow wunderkind who happens to be on the other side) butting your heads against a concrete wall purposely put up to keep "barbarians" like you out.

The futility of the minority’s effort in the House, if it had any illusion of success therein, is underscored by another reality: Under the rules, even if the requisite 79 are procured, a short-cut of the process will not be possible. Forget what some majority congressmen told you during the debates over the rules, forget what they said to media, the rules simply do not allow it.

Your 79 or more votes at this stage of the proceedings do not buy you an immediate Senate trial. Under the rules, your beloved Chairman can still escort you through 60 lovely session days of perambulating through the Elysian fields of sufficiency in form and substance.

He can serenade you with the mantra that your 79 votes become relevant only when your Committee sends to the full House a report and resolution finding the complaint insufficient in form and substance. Then, and only then, can your posse of 79 or more override that "contrary" resolution.

You see, he will tell you in that familiar soothing voice, the opposition lost its chance when it filed its amended complaint with only 42 signatures. If 79 members of the House had signed, why, the complaint would under the Constitution have constituted the articles of impeachment and trial at the Senate would have forthwith proceeded. Since that didn’t happen, the Constitutional process had to lock in. That simply means you are in his territory where numbers do matter…the majority’s numbers, that is.

Moreover, he might add, even when a contrary resolution is overridden by the one-third of all members of the House, the complaint does not immediately go to the Senate. Under the rules, the matter goes back to the Committee on Justice, which "shall forthwith prepare the articles of impeachment." But this time the rules do not set a limit to how long the committee may take in that arduous task of writing the articles.

So, you wonder why the Committee is stuck at the "prejudicial" issue of which complaint it should consider? Why hasn’t anyone objected on the ground that this distraction isn’t allowed under the rules? It’s because, obviously, neither the rules nor extant jurisprudence proscribes this kind of allegedly "pointless" debate.

But the people, opposition leaders thunder, will not take this inanity much longer. The people want to know the truth. That, of course, is the "political exercise" thesis stated another way. But if that’s true, the minority is in the wrong bull ring. They should demonstrate the courage of their convictions and take the "political" route, with all the risks and uncertain outcomes such a route suggests.

That, it could turn out, is still the best shot the opposition has.