Notes on watching the Vice President’s impeachment trial

CEBU CITY, Philippines — The session hall of the Philippine Senate has limited space, and for millions of Filipinos, life must go on, so we keep vigil over the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte with the help of the media. We expect journalists and other media and communication practitioners to comprehensively, reliably, and intelligently report about the consequential constitutional process of exacting accountability from our second highest official.

The senators sit as judges over the twice-impeached vice president. Over them, at the same time, Filipinos sit in judgment. The citizenry is by no means indifferent to the proceedings. The people have by and large paid attention to impeachments in recent memory that progressed into full-blown trials, and made themselves heard on their denouement. Former senators Gringo Honasan, Miriam Defensor-Santiago, and Juan Ponce Enrile, who voted to suppress the presentation of perceived evidence in the botched impeachment trial of then president Joseph Estrada in 2001, suffered defeat in that year’s senatorial elections. Former senators Tessie Aquino-Oreta, Kit Tatad, and Nikki Coseteng, who had also voted against the opening of the envelope believed to contain evidence that would incriminate Estrada, would never again win a senatorial race. The majority in the electorate dumped them, apparently having found their performance as senator-judges reprehensible.

In 2012, amid the impeachment trial of then chief justice Renato Corona, almost three-fourths of Filipinos registered their conviction that he must be convicted. The senator-judges at the time, after a 43-day trial, appeared to mirror the public sentiment and by a vote of 20-3 found Corona, having failed to accurately disclose his Statement of Assets, Liabilities, and Net Worth (SALN), guilty of betrayal of public trust (the full Senate at the time consisted of 23 persons since Benigno Aquino III’s seat as senator had been left vacant after he campaigned for the presidency and was elected the nation’s 15th chief executive in 2010).

The main lesson from the political fallout of the aborted Estrada impeachment of 2001 is that senator-judges would do well not only to be impartial but also to avoid even the perception of partiality amid the process. Few really knew beforehand what the infamous envelope contained. But the decision to refuse to open it proved potent enough to spark what historians and journalists call Edsa Dos or the People Power Revolution of 2001, which led, foremost, to Estrada’s ouster from Malacañang.

The lesson of the Corona impeachment trial, on the other hand, is that citizens, too, weigh law, evidence, and ethics while they closely follow the accountability-exacting process. Moreover, they hold public officials to the highest standards of integrity: Weight of office, in Corona’s case, of chief magistrate maintains rather than lowers the bar for honesty in complying with a transparency mechanism as seemingly quotidian as the filing of a SALN.

In both the Estrada and Corona impeachment trials, media practitioners served as instruments for the citizenry to be vigilant, such that the people made themselves heard on a political question in accordance with their best lights.

The Supreme Court unanimously recognized the events of Jan. 16 to 20, 2001, including Estrada’s loss and Gloria Arroyo’s assumption of the presidency as a “peaceful expression of the popular will” resulting from the former’s permanent disability “because he had lost the public’s trust,” which in turn made it “imperative that the rule of succession in the Constitution be enforced” (Estrada vs. Desierto, G.R. No 146710-15).

Similarly though grudgingly, in words that seem to dignify without evidence the opinion that Corona’s impeachment was the fruit of political vendetta, the High Court en banc, in a decision dated Jan. 12, 2021, recognized Corona’s conviction the Senate impeachment court and consequent removal from office. (The justices declared him entitled to retirement benefits since no regular court had established his liability to disentitlement therefrom, though the public well understands that Corona’s passing, not any conclusive pronouncement of “not guilty,” was what ended litigation against him).

The Supreme Court has junked the vice president’s petition to void her impeachment trial.

But the Philippine communication ecosystem that attended the Estrada and Corona impeachment trials is no more.

Extant is a mediascape that had been manipulated by political operators for the outrageous, cynical, bloodthirsty, and regionalistic campaign to elect Rodrigo Duterte president in 2016 and the manufacture of an irrational longing for a fantastical golden past to restore the Marcoses to Malacañang through a President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. The release of a Facebook video, edited to favor the vice president’s case, from no less than senator-judge Pia Cayetano, underscores our people’s vulnerability to further serious falsehood.

As the Inquirer reported: “The one-minute video came with a caption suggesting that the House prosecution’s move to have the Vice President’s tax and bank records presented in court was a mere fishing expedition or a blind attempt to find evidence of her alleged ill-gotten wealth.”

Eagle-eyed citizens have taken note of the dishonorable act and filed an ethics complaint against the senator.

“The deliberate editing of official impeachment proceedings to mislead the public is not merely a political act. It is a serious ethical issue that strikes at the integrity of the Senate as an impeachment court,” the complainants said.

To prudently keep vigil over the vice president’s impeachment trial is more important than ever.

Screen each senator-judge for impartiality.

Only patronize news organizations that strive for the highest standards of independent journalism such as the Inquirer and CDN Digital, Rappler, GMA News Online, ABS-CBN News, Bilyonaryo News Channel, and The Philippine Star, among others.

Follow fact-checkers including Vera Files and Fact-Check PH to stay alert to falsehood about the impeachment trial, which often misuses the logos of legitimate media outlets.

Listen to outstanding journalists such as Christian Esguerra and Ellen Tordesillas, who have been clarifying instead of muddling issues related to the proceedings, aided by experts in relevant fields such as law and auditing.

Listen to wise voices such as the historian Manuel Quezon III and Professor Emeritus Randy David, who have been reflecting on and critiquing the trial in the context of our common good as one nation.

Quezon has made great, laudable efforts to point out that the trial is not a criminal trial designed to be predominantly facilitated using the rules of court, (especially not a setting to use the said rules to absolve the respondent), but a proceeding to determine the vice president’s fitness to continue in office.

He is right. Whether to convict the vice president is a political question, a matter which, for a nation that claims to be for God and for country ought to be settled, with the help of law and evidence as the people desire, yes, but ultimately, using a moral framework.

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