Thicket

The blitzkrieg Corona impeachment effort has run into an impenetrable thicket. That thicket is composed of institutions.

Institutions embody values the community holds, values that have accrued through many years of collective life structured by rules. Individuals might be puny but institutions are resilient. Institutions are best when they withstand rabble-rousers and lynching mobs, holding fast to protect the individual rights on which our democracy is built, ensuring order and fairness when these are threatened by scorching passions and searing partisanship.

Democracy’s greatest nemesis is not the tyrant. It is the mob.

Tyrants are easily unmasked. The mob draws its power from some populist claim or some commonplace opinion passed off as The Truth.

Tyrants confront democracy and blatantly attempt to crush it. See what Bashir Assad is doing in Syria.

The mob turns democracy on its head, disembowels its institutions of civility and tries to pass off common barbarity as the “weapons of the weak.” It draws in the ignorant and imbues them with the false power of a banal idea. See what the prosecution panel in the Corona trial is trying to do.

Sen. Ernesto Maceda, a most astute observer of our politics, thinks Day 5 of the impeachment trial is probably the turning point in this epic struggle. I will tend to agree with him.

The highlight of Day 5, we will recall, is the dialogue between Senator Juan Ponce Enrile and lead prosecutor Niel Tupas. It was precipitated by a completely uncalled-for manifestation by Tupas asking the impeachment court to be more liberal. Enrile asked if this meant junking the normal rules of evidence, allowing leading questions and, in so many words, opening the door to so much speculative exercise. A completely dumbfounded Tupas could not specify what he wanted.

What he wanted, of course, was to turn the impeachment court into a kangaroo court. He wanted the senator-judges to be a rubber-stamp assembly, freely accepting all the propaganda the prosecution thinly disguises as articles of impeachment. He wanted, ultimately, that the accused not be shielded by due process and the presumption of innocence — the basic guarantees that distinguish citizens who are free from barbarians who are not.

Enrile is too much of a statesman, too much a servant of the law, to yield to this barbaric demand. If we are to conserve our democracy, due process must yield no ground. The Senate President would sooner yield his seat than be made an accomplice to the desecration of the rule of law.

Enrile quickly understood that what Tupas wanted amounts to rendering due process meaningless and, by implication, the institutions of the rule of law impotent. Everything will be done by means of trial by publicity, judgment by the mob, lynching by means of orchestrated vilification. We might as well return to the primitive means of trial by fire or by cruel ordeal.

Or maybe we can appoint sorcerers as judges, propagandists as lawyers, charlatans as prosecutors. We will then let an army of Red Guards loose upon the place, convicting people by means of chanting slogans composed by demagogues. Should that happen, however, the public order becomes unhinged.

In that confrontation between the statesman and the punk, the statesman triumphed convincingly. The sustainability of our democratic order benefits from that.

Enrile’s insight into what Tupas was demanding did not happen in an instant. From the moment 188 congressmen, behaving like sheep rather than thinking men, signed an impeachment complaint that was not yet written out, it was clear the whole nation was being led to a farce.

Impeachment is a solemn act resorted to by a democratic polity only reluctantly and with much circumspection. It is a costly process fraught with so much potential long-term damage to a society’s painstakingly assembled institutions. It is not a game to be switched on a whim — or on the basis of some psychotic need to inflict power.

What the prosecution wants to do is to try the Chief Justice by publicity and, having demonized him, declare he is unfit for the office he holds. That is akin to stomping on a perfectly plump fruit and then declaring it inedible.

This is why the propaganda effort is much better endowed than the actual prosecution panel. This is why the prosecutors themselves feel compelled to behave like propagandists, showing utter disrespect to the impeachment court by freely spinning their stories and extrapolating from their thin evidence.

This is why the exasperated senators are trying so hard to keep the impeachment trial from being overwhelmed by the free-wheeling trial by publicity. They have several times warned the legal panels to desist from discussing the merits of the case with the media — to little avail on the part of the punks of the prosecution.

Sadly, much of the mainstream media has been nudged along by this massive propaganda effort to create out of the whole public a de facto kangaroo court. We have seen screaming headlines that say, for instance, that the tax returns do not justify the declared assets. That is a conclusion, not a fact. A tax return represents revenue for a specific duration; real property represents a lifetime of work.

The Senate is the intended victim of this massive propaganda effort because it seeks to make the impeachment court ultimately irrelevant, preempted by an engineered public opinion.

Considering all that has happened, and all that is happening, this impeachment process has become much larger than a certain Renato Corona. It is even larger than merely the independence of the judiciary, although that is surely important. This is now a test of the resilience of that thicket of institutions that guarantee order and sanity in our collective lives.