The impeachment circus is in town. We will know, over the next few days, if this process will be vital enough to hold our people’s attention and sway strong emotions whichever way.
This impeachment trial is basically different from the one we saw a little over a decade ago, involving then President Joseph Estrada. In the previous one, the impeachment process was launched by the opposition against the sitting administration. This time, the process was initiated by the administration against the head of what is often described as the weakest branch of government.
The dynamics of this process will therefore be different. The person on trial is the underdog, not the overlord.
Even before the trial even began we saw an intense and vicious propaganda barrage mounted by administration forces. The first objective of the propaganda barrage appeared to be to bully and publicly humiliate the Chief Justice and thereby force him to resign ahead of a trial process. Since the Chief Justice did not buckle down in the face of an awesome apparatus of scorn mobilized to smear him, the objective of the propaganda effort now is to try him by publicity and preempt a balanced and informed judgment on the part of the Senate.
One colleague, in his column, reports that a war chest amounting to P2 billion has been amassed to ensure the Chief Justice is convicted. We have no way of verifying that report. What we can see is that the leftwing groups that have recently morphed into pro-Aquino rent-a-mobs found enough cash to pepper the public with full-page anti-Corona propaganda.
The money spent on these vacuous ads might have been better used building homes for the flood victims in Cagayan de Oro or Iligan. The administration-driven propaganda effort has so far failed to inflame passions in the streets. To the contrary, it has reinforced the characterization of the Chief Justice as the underdog in this battle, a quietly spoken David courageously facing the administration Goliath — in fact, an army of foul-mouthed Goliaths building their case on so much intellectual dishonesty.
The judiciary is often characterized as the weakest branch of government because it neither controls the purse nor the army. Its parity, however, draws from the rule of law, the fundamental principle of any republican order.
Under the rule of law, the judiciary has the final word. In the slapstick impeachment complaint signed, without first reading it, by 188 congressmen, the bulk of the articles involve rulings reflecting the collective wisdom of the bench. On the face of it, this complaint subverts the essential element of the rule of law: that the judiciary has the final word. That is the fundamental anomaly of this complaint, far more important than the fact that the complainants signed something they have not read.
The parallelism has been drawn between Cory attempting to stampede the Senate in 1991 to extend the Military Bases Agreement by organizing a march on it and her son now trying to stampede the Senate by unleashing a massively funded propaganda effort to overshadow the trial proceedings. A closer parallelism, however, might be the case of deposed Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf.
At the peak of his dictatorial power, Musharraf attempted to control the judiciary by taking out independent justices and replacing them with malleable ones. The nation’s lawyers, in their formal garb, marched in the streets to oppose the effort to muzzle the courts. The dictator lost this confrontation. His power quickly waned. Soon enough he was ousted.
As in Pakistan, our lawyers have rallied to defend the independence of the judiciary against what increasingly appears to be a highly partisan effort to subordinate it. The strong stance of the lawyers’ groups has been endorsed by the Association of Generals and Flag Officers (AGFO). The stance resonates well with professionals in other disciplines.
As this impeachment process proceeds, the line of battle could eventually be drawn between those who independently discern and those who are merely impressionable, the masters and the morons.
The czars of the administration’s propaganda effort are taking the public intelligence too lightly. It is bad enough that the propaganda is shrill and vicious, trying too hard at vilifying the Chief Justice to eclipse the actual attack on the independence of the judiciary. Worse, the effort is oversupplied with fabricated claims and reeks with so much mental dishonesty.
In a vain effort to inflate properties attributed Corona for propaganda effect, the prosecutors included condominium parking slots and assets owned by persons related to the Chief Justice only by affinity.
When the defense team sought a pretrial to classify the evidence, the prosecutors described this as a resort to technicality. Niel Tupas of the prosecution, when warned by senators about discussing the merits of the case ahead of the trial proper, resorted to the strictest technicality by saying, bare-faced, that they are yet to formally enter their appearance, the gag order does not apply to them.
Palace spokesmen added their own supply of mental dishonesty to the fray. Claiming that the impeachment complaint was filed by the legislative branch, the Senate gag order does not apply to them. On that shaky logical ground, the Palace effort to reduce the Senate proceedings into a kangaroo court went into full throttle.
One Palace mouthpiece took the cake by suggesting the Palace had a “Plan B” in the event Corona is acquitted. What a stupid thing to say. An impeachment proceeding is the supreme sovereign process. There can possibly be no “Plan B” to it.
It is now up to the senators to conduct this process either as an instance of democratic statesmanship or a mockery of it.