I RECENTLY heard Renato Reyes being interviewed on DZBB by Weng Salvacion and Weng de la Peña concerning the grounds for an impeachment complaint against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. I have yet to read the full text of the complaint filed by the militant leftist Bayan and endorsed by the Makabayan bloc. But based on Reyes’ own articulation on air, what immediately stood out was not merely the weakness of the legal theory being advanced, but its deeper implications for democratic accountability itself. What was being proposed was less a legal indictment than a political narrative seeking constitutional validation.
The Bayan complaint appears to hinge on “betrayal of public trust” grounded on an expansive and elastic notion of command responsibility. The president is supposedly impeachable for failing to curb corruption, specifically for signing a budget with unprogrammed appropriations, for allegedly “enabling” DPWH practices such as allocables, and for supposed involvement in graft and corruption, which Reyes disclosed as based on the testimonies of Zaldy Co and Roberto Bernardo. The problem is not the moral indignation behind these claims, but the legal shortcuts taken to sustain them.
At first glance, the argument sounds morally compelling. But impeachment is not a moral rally. It is a constitutional process with demanding thresholds. And when examined carefully, the logic being advanced collapses under its own weight.
Start with unprogrammed appropriations. These are not a presidential invention, nor are they already adjudicated per se as unconstitutional. They are a recognized feature of the Philippine budget system, crafted, debated and inserted by Congress. The president does not author the General Appropriations Act. He either signs or vetoes what the legislature passes. To argue that signing a congressionally enacted budget that contains unprogrammed items constitutes betrayal of public trust is to confuse policy disagreement with constitutional violation. That is not accountability; that is retroactive absolutism.
The same analytical error appears in the claim regarding DPWH “allocables.” These allocables are, at least on their face, technical planning instruments within the DPWH, used to identify potential projects and funding priorities, and it has yet to be established that their existence or use automatically translated into actual fraud, ghost projects, or plunder. Furthermore, even if corrupted, corruption within a line department and in Congress does not automatically translate into presidential guilt. Command responsibility is not strict liability. In Philippine jurisprudence, it requires proof of knowledge, the capacity to prevent or punish, and a deliberate failure to act despite that capacity. What is being offered instead is hierarchical guilt by association: questionable practices are assumed to be corrupt, corruption is assumed to be presidentially enabled, and responsibility is inferred rather than demonstrated. This erases the entire chain of accountability within the executive branch and turns the presidency into a catch-all scapegoat for institutional dysfunction.
The evidentiary claims fare no better. Roberto Bernardo, by all public accounts, has not directly implicated the president. There is no allegation of instruction, participation, authorization, or personal benefit. Zaldy Co’s allegations suffer from an even more fatal flaw: Aside from its inconsistencies, absent was any direct presidential nexus. His statements describe an alleged corrupt ecosystem where former House speaker Martin Romualdez was implicated. The logic being used is a chain of inference. Co imputed corruption on Romualdez, and therefore the president would have been culpable too. That is not evidence. That is an analytical shortcut that impeachment doctrine does not allow. Impeachment cannot rest on atmospherics, insinuation, or moral contagion. It must stand on demonstrable acts directly traceable with proof to the constitutional officer himself.
Taken together, what is being constructed is not a case of personal constitutional culpability but an indictment of systemic corruption. But impeachment is not a general anti-corruption mechanism. It is a targeted constitutional remedy that requires precise attribution of wrongdoing to the impeachable officer. Stretching command responsibility to cover every failure of governance does not strengthen accountability. It destroys it.
What makes this argument even more troubling is what happens when Bayan Muna’s own logic is turned back on itself.
Their impeachment theory rests on the idea that failure to prevent wrongdoing equals guilt, that proximity equals participation, and that leadership implies liability even without proof of direct action or intent. But this is precisely the logic that has historically been used, often abusively, against progressive and left-leaning organizations, including Bayan itself.
Using their own reasoning, one could argue, purely analytically, that if acts of rebellion or sedition are committed by armed groups that have long been alleged, investigated, or judicially cited as ideologically aligned with organizations publicly associated with Bayan, if Bayan and its members repeatedly refuse to categorically denounce these acts while maintaining ideological affinity, then they could be held responsible for “failing to curb” rebellion or sedition. No proof of direct orders. No proof of operational control. Mere proximity and ideology would suffice.
That, of course, is an argument Bayan has always, and rightly, rejected as red-tagging. For decades, they have insisted that political advocacy, legal organizing, and ideological critique do not amount to rebellion or sedition absent concrete acts, intent and direct participation. Guilt by association has been consistently rejected because it is incompatible with due process and democratic pluralism.
Yet in this impeachment effort, Bayan abandons that same principle and embraces the very logic that has been used against them. That is ironic and conceptually hypocritical.
If failure to prevent wrongdoing is itself an impeachable offense, then accountability becomes limitless and arbitrary. Presidents become strictly liable for every scandal in the bureaucracy. Political actors become vulnerable to prosecution or impeachment based on proximity and association rather than action.
This is the real danger of the argument being advanced. It undermines the very logic of constitutional accountability by replacing evidence with inference and doctrine with outrage. When impeachment is reduced to inference rather than evidence, it ceases to discipline power and instead normalizes political vengeance as constitutional practice.
Impeachment should be reserved for clear, attributable, and grave abuses of constitutional office. Anything less cheapens the process and turns it into a theater of partisan vengeance.
Antonio P. Contreras PhD is a professor at the University of the Philippines Los Baños and vice chairman of the board of the state-run PTV Network Inc.
