Reminder: Impeachment is a political game!

I've said it before and I'll say it here again… the impeachment of a President is not a criminal exercise nor is it an administrative sanction. It is a political game, plain and simple. It doesn't matter if the evidence against the President is strong or not, the bottom line is, whether the President still has political clout and has the confidence of the majority in Congress. It is for this reason why then US Pres. Bill Clinton was cleared of his impeachment charge even if he openly lied about his sexual misconduct with Monica Lewinsky. But then, that impeachment case went all the way to fruition, and the minority group accepted the decision of the majority.

In the impeachment proceedings against Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (GMA), her political supports obviously want to kill these proceedings in the committee hearings and since the minority bloc didn't have the numbers to ram home their impeachment plan, they walked out! Clearly, the opposition thought that they were replicating the walkout done by the opposition during the Erap impeachment trial, which led to EDSA Dos, but that too didn't happen. What happened here is simple defeat by the opposition by the ruling majority and that's what democracy is all about!

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We've been writing about the shift to a Federal and Parliamentary system of government, yet I submit that if we achieved this, nothing much will happen to this country if our present electoral problems remain. I'm referring to the current electoral system that is still in place and the state of our political parties. It doesn't take an Einstein for one to figure out the great imbalance between the politician's spending between P500 to P800 million to win or lose the elections for a senator's salary, which is a mere P35, 000. Of course, we know that the real target is for those senators to get their filthy hands on that more than P200 million pork barrel that each of them can control as if it were his personal savings account.

This is the reality of Philippine politics today and we're only talking about elections for senator. What about elections for President? The figures are staggering to say the least! Worse of all is when you go down the line, down to the level of the barangay elections where barangay captains often spend as much as city mayors or councilors just to win the post. Next year, we're supposed to have another barangay elections, but for as long as there is no cap in their campaign spending, we will see much of the same ugly politics that has permeated our political landscape for a century.

The whole trouble in Philippine politics today is due to "Personality Politics," something that the Marcos Dictatorship created when he threw away our two-party system, which at that time was working quite well. You cannot win any presidential bid if you didn't belong to the Nationalista Party or the Liberal Party. When one party wins the presidency, the other party automatically assumes the role of opposition. It was really that simple.

But Marcos changed all that. He gathered all the political parties together, wined and dined them and put them in a new political animal called the Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL). Yet this political Goliath was embarrassingly trounced by a pipsqueak political David called the Pusyon Bisaya. But since the media then was controlled by the Marcoses, no one in the rest of the Philippines except us in Cebu knew about this political debacle.

When Marcos fled at the height of the EDSA Revolt, the KBL melted like a block of sugar dropped into a coffee cup. But this political genie was already out of the bottle. Today, most our major political partiers emanated from a failed or successful presidential bid. The late Ramon "Monching" Mitra created the Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino (LDP) and lost the presidential elections and the LDP disappeared from the political landscape. In 1992, Gen. Fidel V. Ramos couldn't use the KBL; hence he built the Lakas Party and won the presidency.

Then came former Amb. Eduardo "Danding" Cojuangco's Nationalists People's Coalition (NPC). There are still a few remnants of the late Sen. Raul Roco's Aksyon Demokratiko or former Defense Secretary Rene de Villa's Reporma and of course, we still have with us deposed President Joseph "Erap" Estrada's Partido ng Masang Pilipino (PMP). Locally, we once had the Partido Panaghiusa Party and this mutated into the Promdi Party of Lito Osmeña. In Cebu City, we still have the BO-PK of Mayor Tomas Osmeña and the Kusog Party of former mayor Alvin Garcia.

If you ask me, that's too many political parties which serves only the political personality. Let's go back to the two-party system, which works very well in the US and used to work quite well for us.

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