[Newspoint] The reckoning

The prospect is raised that the preoccupation with the May 12 midterm elections will slow, if not altogether stop, the buildup to the moment of reckoning for Sara Duterte.

As it happens, the next move in Duterte’s case rests with Congress, but Congress is expected to suspend all time-consuming business during the electoral season to make time for its own revalidation. All 317 seats of its House of Representatives and half the Senate’s 24 seats are up for grabs. 

Three articles of impeachment have been filed with the House, and a fourth is in the works. A third of the House voting for any of those articles or for a consolidated case is all it takes to send it to the Senate for trial. A verdict of guilty gets Duterte out as vice-president and of all other government positions she holds and also bars her for life from public office. 

Obviously, there’s not enough time for such a necessarily long and tedious process. But also, possibly, congressmen seeking reelection don’t want to reveal where they stand on the issue for fear of alienating any prospective voters. 

Anyway, although the chances of impeachment appear almost nil at this time, that’s no reason for the Duterte business to be shelved. It’s the issue of the moment, indeed the issue that overarches all issues. Even local and provincial candidates, as a basic moral test, should declare themselves on the issue. 

In any case, a recent national survey has shown 41 percent in favor of impeachment, 35 percent against, and 19 percent undecided. No doubt, those findings were informed by the extensive, open hearings conducted jointly by four House committees that turned up what constituted prima facie evidence, which makes a case plausible enough to proceed to trial: Sara Duterte and some of her confidential staff took hundreds of millions of taxpayer pesos and tried to cover up the crime with crudely manufactured receipts. That’s plain malversation and, by impeachment terms, a betrayal of public trust. In fact, she refused to take part in the hearings, and chose to go around crying harassment, as might be expected of other accused who happen to be politicians and have nothing to offer in their own defense. 

Sara, according to her own father, Rodrigo, the former president, is the family’s “drama queen.” She also happens to be the last Duterte in a public position powerful and high-profile enough to be exploitable for electoral advantage. I’m not sure, though, that dramatics will cut it; definitely some smarts and political skills will be required. And her father did show some of those qualities.

An idolater of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, although a rather vulgar and primitive copycat, Rodrigo Duterte repackaged himself as some sort of maverick. Playing to masses of national voters made desperate by generations of poverty, he managed to leap straight from mayor of the southern city of Davao to president and, when his term ended, to position her daughter Sara for a shot at the presidency herself six years later, three years from now, in 2028. But captive to notorious habits they developed as provincial potentates, the Dutertes simply could not help overreaching and betraying a sense of self-entitlement and impunity. 

President Duterte made himself singularly infamous by ceding the strategic and mineral-rich West Philippine Sea to China and by declaring a war on drugs that left tens of thousands dead by extrajudicial means; he has been under investigation by prosecutors of the International Criminal Court, in The Hague, for those killings. His presidency was also plagued by cronyism and corruption. 

As her family’s last hope against retribution, Sara Duterte not only has to beat impeachment, but also has to win the presidency and, with that, the power of pardon and military command. She may have won a stay of impeachment, but only for now. Activists, mostly from the Catholic church and civil society, are not letting her off; neither are they letting Congress forget it has a constitutional and moral duty to impeach and try her. These activists are coming together in common cause and increasing numbers, and are planning to mount a serious show of force within the next fortnight. 

To be sure, the Dutertes claim to have their own moral army — the Iglesia ni Cristo, which has itself announced an earlier deployment. But that’s not unlike covering up malversation with fraudulent receipts: the Iglesia is more like a political dynasty than a church. – Rappler.com