Half-baked

It came as a bit of a shock because it seemed not so long ago that a generation had grown up too young to have witnessed former Sen. Joker Arroyo’s famous opening statement, with its unforgettable line, “We cannot have a nation run by a thief.” More shocking still, you cannot find his speech in its entirety online. And the anthology I edited, “Twenty Speeches That Moved A Nation,” has, sadly, long been out of print. But let me share portions from it to prove the point I want to make. Read what Arroyo thundered before the Senate:

“The brazen manner with which the President finally took custody of these public funds shows the depths of shame and disgrace to which his Office has fallen. The prosecution will prove that from the house of Atong Ang’s mother, Governor Singson, together with the President’s intermediary, Atong Ang, brought the crisp bills, totaling P130 million, representing the P90 million withdrawn from Westmont Bank, plus the P40 million earlier withdrawn by Alma Alfaro from LandBank Shaw Boulevard, directly to the President’s home at Number l Polk Street, North Greenhills.

“At this juncture, Your Honors, please, this P130 million must be differentiated from the sums Congressman Apostol mentioned—that is jueteng money. These sums I refer to are tobacco money and these are public funds. That is why the seriousness of how public funds got into the pocket of the President is something we would request you to ponder very carefully. After all, both Governor Singson and Mr. Ang were close friends of the President and could be trusted to be complicit partners in this transaction.

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“Governor Singson will reveal in detail what happened at the President’s house. He will narrate how Mr. Estrada scolded Atong Ang for giving part of the money to the First Lady, and to presidential son Jinggoy Estrada. Governor Singson will narrate how the President also berated Atong Ang for pocketing a portion of the funds for himself without the President’s knowledge and permission. Governor Singson will also tell us that the First Lady even expressed her profound thanks to him for the millions of pesos she received. Governor Singson will give us a firsthand account of how public funds, intended to alleviate the living conditions of our needy tobacco farmers in Ilocos Sur, instead found their way into the pockets of a greedy President.

“This creative and bald-faced manner of diverting cash shows how the people’s money could be easily stolen. It couldn’t be done—no way—unless it had been undertaken under the instruction and under the auspices of the Office of the President. The amount is just too big and the transaction too fast. In three days, public funds were converted into private funds; from Vigan, in three days, they were in the pocket of the President of the Philippines. By authorizing the release of public funds, with the clear and deliberate intention of ultimately appropriating these amounts for himself, the President must account to the people he has sworn to serve and protect. He is clearly unfit to lead. He must go.”

I recall the opening statements during the Renato Corona impeachment trial, which were of a quality much higher than the initial bungling that characterized the House managers’ conduct in that trial. That is because they at least aspired to match Arroyo in substance and eloquence not least because he was himself a senator by that time (that he would disgrace himself with his vote in that exercise was, charitably, a future unknown to all). When Mamamayang Liberal party list Rep. Leila de Lima set out to make her opening statement, she could do so with ample precedents in mind as to what House managers (referred to, in the mind-numbing jargon of the petty preferred by today’s pygmy Senate as “prosecutors”) could do and say. But the sad reality is that past precedents, reverenced in mature institutions, are as pearls before swine today.

American colonial officials never believed Filipinos would be suited to the jury system and never even bothered. Filipino lawmakers have shared the same assumptions except for one exception: impeachment, which was essentially trial by jury in the legislative arena. Since no impeachment succeeded between 1935 and 1987, we don’t know if our native senators then would have been similarly incapable of basic comprehension as the majority of our senators since 2001, who have demonstrated a willful ignorance of where impeachment came from and of the plentiful, not to mention contemporary examples of how impeachments could proceed, if only they set aside their ignorance and observed the institution from which we borrowed impeachment, the United States Congress.

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Email: mlquezon3@gmail.com; Twitter: @mlq3