ALAN Peter Cayetano, who seems to have a penchant for being on the wrong side, has complained about counsel — he mentioned both sides, but clearly meant the prosecution — using “loaded terms” that, he fears, may induce bias on the part of the public. He appeals for neutrality, which is ironic — and disgusting, really, — considering that he has made no creditable effort at concealing his allegiance to former president Rodrigo Duterte’s family.
No, the public should not be neutral. People must be mad, incensed at the shamelessness, outraged by the effrontery with which all demands of decency, honesty, transparency and accountability have been callously snubbed by the public official on trial whose defense Cayetano has undertaken to be responsible for in the Senate. Why ask the people to be neutral? So that they might accept without protest whatever it is that the pro-Duterte cohort in the Senate may decide to dish out to the public as a verdict? If it belongs to the essence of a democracy for a government to be accountable to the people, then they have the right, at the very least, to howl in protest, to hiss and boo when senators who, with unction and the dramatic flair of donning purple robes, swear to do justice but fail the people by using the tyranny of numbers to smother what should be the demand of truth and righteousness.
It is not merely by the Senate that Vice President Sara Duterte is tried. It is trial by the people and for the people, for even if it may not be the people who are addressed ’Your Honor” nor they whom counsel on both sides address, the people will nonetheless render judgment. While the indirect rout of holding senators responsible for their votes is through the sanction of the ballot when those who now sit as “senator-judges” (a term that always makes me cringe!) put themselves forward once more as candidates, there are more direct means by which public outrage may express themselves and make popular opinion count without necessarily having to take the slippery slope to lawlessness. It has happened in many democracies — without any deficit to the democratic nature of their systems — that leaders have been compelled by sheer public pressure and popular outcry to relinquish their positions or to stand down! It happened twice in our history — with the more recent one having to do again with an impeachment trial gone wrong — when senators voted to suppress evidence.
That a trial is ongoing already constitutes the concession to the demand of due process. But the neutrality of the public is not — and has never been — a demand. In fact, it was public outrage that led to the filing of the impeachment complaint and the overwhelming decision of the House of Representatives to forward to the Senate the articles of impeachment. It is significant that the public officer who now stands before the bar has been impeached twice. It counts for very little that the first set of articles of impeachment was declared void by the Supreme Court. That might all be very well for those engaged in the niceties of procedure. But for the purpose of determining the public pulse in respect to the charges against the vice president, the fact that she was impeached twice by the people’s popularly elected representatives should make clear that the people have not been neutral.
All that is required is that public discourse remain rational, and rationality is not really hemmed in by the rules of evidence by which evidence is admitted or set aside before courts of law. The law does not and cannot have a monopoly in the definition of rational procedure and rational discourse. The proverbial “fire in the belly” is not antithetical to rationality because they who are not a fire at all will not bother to search out the facts, scrutinize matters that come to the public’s attention, ask the critical questions and frame the propositions for popular discourse.
Public intellectuals, media personalities who are assiduous about their homework, students who go beyond mouthing slogans and echoing platitudes, law professors and jurists, political theorists and scientists, moral philosophers and theologians, the Church — all should be hard at work leading to the formation of public opinion. This is no time for diffidence. If there is any reticence at all, let it be about not having an opinion. But to ask the public to be neutral, why should it be?
rannie_aquino@san.beda.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph