The Senate

This 2025 is a watershed year for the Philippine Senate, once the bastion of excellence, purposeful governance and visionary nation building.

For two reasons: one, 12 senators are either being retired, replaced or repurposed. And judging from recent surveys, the Senate that convenes in July this year won’t be any better, nor any worse, than the present one. In other words, it will be a so-so or just an average Senate.

Two, the Senate received last week, after making the House of Representatives secretary general wait for more than an hour, the impeachment articles vs. Vice President Sara Duterte, the first time a second highest official of the land has been impeached. The complaint was signed by 240 congressmen, 79 percent of total House membership, or 2.4 times the required one-third or 101 members to affirm the Articles of Impeachment.

Regarding the old benchmark for an ideal Senate, in 1946 til the late 1960s, nearly half of the 12 senators were lawyers. And the lawyers were almost always in the Top Ten in the Bar, Bar topnotchers.

Today, out of five supposed lawyers, our Senate has only one Bar topnotcher, Koko Pimentel, and he has yet to show his full potential. The lawyer-senators are outnumbered by media and or entertainment figures.

The five lawyers in the present Senate are: Escudero, Pimentel, Pia Cayetano, Alan Cayetano, and Francis Tolentino.  The eight media/entertainment-linked senators are: Bong Revilla, Robin Padilla, Jinggoy Estrada, Lito Lapid, JV Ejercito, Loren Legarda, Raffy Tulfo and Grace Poe.

Section 4, Article XI of the Philippine Constitution mandates: “In case the verified complaint or resolution of impeachment is filed by at least one-third of all the Members of the House, the same shall constitute the Articles of Impeachment, and trial by the Senate shall forthwith proceed.” In plain English, “forthwith” means immediately. ASAP.

But the usually genial and affable Senate President, Francis “Chiz” Escudero, 55, a UP-trained lawyer (UP produces more than half of all Bar topnotchers), is hemming and hawing. He is not sure what to say or he is trying to avoid saying what he wants to say. There is only one reason for SP Escudero’s ponderous dilemma: politics.

Chiz may be looking at any or all of these considerations: 1) What is there in the impeachment process for me? Financial? Political? The good of the country?; 2) Will a guilty or a not guilty verdict against Sara affect my presidential ambitions?; 3) Will I still be Senate president after the trial and after the May 12, 2025 elections?; 4) Does the present Senate of 23 incumbents have the votes to convict Sara?: 5) Is there enough time to conduct what could be a tedious, messy or unpredictable trial that will be seen live on national television with an audience of millions?; 6) Will Sara’s trial affect the outcome of the 2025 elections and, for that matter, the May 2028 presidential elections? 7) If I were to run for president in 2028 who would be my likely adversaries? Sara Duterte? Raffy Tulfo? Bong Go? A tycoon like Ramon Ang or MVP? Or a Marcos? Finally, just how much clout do the Dutertes still wield?

One thing is definite. The Marcoses want Sara Duterte impeached. That is why the first to sign the impeachment articles in the House against Sara is presidential son Sandro Marcos, 31. Sandro is fuming that Sara has threatened to assassinate his dad, the President, his mom, the First Lady and his uncle, Speaker Martin Romualdez.

The sooner the trial, the better. It’s called accountability. And Sara is guilty. Under the Constitution, an impeachable officer like the vice president may be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, “culpable violation of the Constitution, treason, bribery, graft and corruption, other high crimes, or betrayal of public trust.”

According to drafters of the 1987 Constitution, betrayal of public trust is a catchall phrase to include all acts which are not punishable by statutes as penal offenses but, nonetheless, render the officer unfit to continue in office.

To be unfit may be physical unfitness like old age, or mental unfitness like being unhinged or moral unfitness. Under the US Constitution, unfit means “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his (her) office.”

Deciding whether Sara is unfit to remain as Vice President thus is a political decision. There is no accepted metric of what constitutes unfitness. It is a perception game.

As I said before, impeachment is basically a shaming act, to make you appear vile, abusive, corrupt to the core and to stir the people’s blood with the searing language of the impeachment complaint. The trial is high drama, a legal rhetoric, a political process. A senator does not have to be literate or educated to cast a vote of conviction.

Said San Beda Graduate School of Law dean Ranhilio Aquino:

“The fact is that these offenses are precisely left undefined because impeachment is meant to be an exercise in ‘political justice,’ which is a determination made by politicians that a high official of government has rendered herself unfit for high office. That does not mean that such officials may be impeached for just about any offense, although the history of impeachment proceedings in the US leaves no doubt that impeachment is not reserved only for the most dramatic of infractions. Federal judges, who are impeachable officials under the laws of the United States, have been booted out of office for tax evasion, conspiracy to solicit bribes and making false statements to a grand jury. Andrew Johnson, 1868, was impeached by the US House of Representatives supposedly for violating the ‘Tenure of Office Act’ by removing the Secretary of War, although he escaped conviction by one vote.”

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