AS EXPECTED, two impeachment complaints were filed at the House of Representatives on Monday against Vice President Sara Duterte, after the expiration of the one-year proscriptive period following similar complaints filed against her in the last Congress. These now join two impeachment complaints earlier filed by different groups against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., which are now being vetted by the House Committee onJustice according to the constitutional procedure.
In our view, the number of impeachment complaints that should currently be on file against either President Marcos or Vice President Duterte is zero. In persisting with these complaints, the lawmakers who are backing them are, in a sense, violating the public trust by forcing Congress to divert from the business of the people they were elected to conduct. If any of the complaints advance through the process in the House, then these thoughtless representatives will have diverted the Senate from legitimate business as well, all for the sake of political grandstanding.
To be clear, we are not condemning the concept of impeachment itself. It is an important mechanism for accountability of high government officials. Likewise, we are not going to offer a judgment of the allegations that the recent complaints have made against the president and vice president. There is a formal process for determining the validity of those, one which should not be influenced by the media.
While impeachment is an important tool, it is one that should be used with great circumspection, and only as a last resort. That, of course, is not what is happening now. The current complaints are purely motivated by political partisanship, and while impeachment is inevitably as much a political process as it is a judicial proceeding, the filers of the current complaints have sunk the concept of impeachment to the depths of buffoonery, and thoroughly discredited it.
Throughout history, not only in the Philippines but in any country with a constitutional impeachment process, impeachment proceedings have been quite rare, and successful ones in which an accused official, especially one from the national leadership, has actually been removed from office for wrongdoing rarer still. Impeachment is difficult, and it is supposed to be difficult precisely because the ultimate judgment is a political decision; the senators sitting as the trial court can cast their votes for guilt or innocence based on any rationale they individually choose, whether that is personal sentiment or political affiliation. For an impeachment to be successful, the legal facts must be so strong that any vote not clearly based on them is impossible.
The other reason that impeachment is designed to be difficult, and only to be resorted to in the most extreme cases, is that it is incredibly disruptive. An impeachment case at the national level essentially brings all legislative business to a halt, and will transfix the nation while it is ongoing. In historic impeachment cases, such as the impeachment of the late former chief justice Renato Corona here, or the impeachments brought against former United States president Bill Clinton and current US President Donald Trump at the end of his first term, the period while the impeachment was ongoing correlated to a dip in economic activity, as businesses, investors and even consumers held back on spending until the resolution of the cases.
In this regard, the Philippines may set a new world record for self-inflicted economic harm due to impeachment cases. It already has established a dubious world first, according to our research, by having impeachment cases against both the president and vice president simultaneously. At a time when the country is already struggling with a cooling economy due to the impact of the ongoing flood control corruption scandal and difficult global conditions, multiple impeachment complaints against the Philippines’ top two elected officials is a recipe for disaster.
Finally, perhaps the biggest sin of the filers of the impeachment complaint is their utter lack of regard for the wishes of the people they supposedly represent. Multiple public opinion surveys going back to at least the middle of last year have been entirely inconclusive, apart from clearly showing there are deep divisions among the public in terms of support for impeachment proceedings against either the president or vice president, and that there is by no means a strong public mandate for it. Thus, any result other than the House of Representatives doing the right thing and rejecting all of the complaints is only likely to deepen these political divisions, and provide no satisfactory outcome to anyone.
