It’s Up to Us Now

First posted 01:42am (Mla time) Sept 04, 2005
By Sylvia L. Mayuga
INQ7.net

The nation is stumped this crucial weekend. The tottering of a global civilization built on oil, with prices soaring higher by the day, is exacting the steepest price on dollar-short countries like ours. New taxes to keep Gloria Arroyo’s administration afloat and the oppressive national burden of servicing debt dating back and ill spent since Marcos complete the hangman’s noose dangling over our heads.
Will the results of secret negotiations all this weekend become a new tipping point when they emerge at tomorrow’s session of Congress’s committee on justice? At this writing, only twenty-four hours remain for jockeying and deal making – to add to or subtract from the 79 votes necessary to elevate the impeachment case to the Senate.

Suddenly members of Congress are the men and women of the hour. And Mrs. Arroyo’s former National Security Adviser, Parañaque Congressman Roilo Golez, says he has been receiving reports that besides the phone calls the President has been making to tilt the neutrality of congressmen and women with all manner of blandishments, there have been unknown and suspicious looking characters hanging threateningly around leading oppositionists, while others have been seen fetched at the airport for secret meetings.

“Gang-rape” is Mr. Golez’s term for last Tuesday’s majority-railroaded vote in the justice committee on whether three impeachment complaints could be considered together or separately. It is an accurate description of a spectacle of utter disrespect for public sentiment that has been demanding the truth about the Garci Tapes and the validity of Mrs. Arroyo’s continued claim to the presidency, and the urgency of an impeachment trial.

“The civil thing,” says Mr. Golez, would have been for the majority “to talk to the oppositionists who walked out” in sheer frustration at the lutong macao climax to the game of attrition played by Mrs. Arroyo and her allies over the past three weeks. No such thing. The idea is to brazen it out.

The committee on justice’s deliberations have been the last word in farce. Mrs. Arroyo’s stubborn suppression of the truth against growing public sentiment (80% of Metro Manila now in the latest SWS survey) can no longer be disguised by legalisms. Juan de la Cruz watching the justice committee’s telecast hearings can see through it all.

So clear has the railroading strategy become that after three weeks of quoting Fr. Joaquin Bernas, SJ, 1986 Constitutional Commissioner and legal expert on the question, he is now being ignored by the GMA camp when he himself punctured their argument this week -- that the three impeachment complaints should be considered separately, and only one can be considered under constitutional rules.

The GMA camp’s basis for this argument is the precedent created by several impeachment complaints against the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice Hilario Davide – the much-quoted Francisco case. Now Fr. Bernas’s historical quote in his Inquirer column on August 29 bears repeating: “The situation in the current controversy is different. On different days, the Lozano complaint, the ‘amended complaint’ and the Lopez complaint were filed. The substance of all three complaints came under the umbrella of ‘betrayal of public trust.’

“As I indicated last Monday, the phrase betrayal of public trust was meant by the Constitutional Commission to be a catchall phrase that could encompass many elements. All three were referred to the Justice Committee on the same day. Since they all involved betrayal of public trust, they could be combined as one, to be tackled in the same proceeding. Thus, only one proceeding was initiated when the three were referred to the Committee.”

Philippine media is challenged now to its greatest cunning as it hounds details of intensive deal making between the Palace and Congress to stop the impeachment dead in tracks before it even gets to striking distance of the Senate.

It seems there’s more and more to unearth with every day that passes on Mrs. Arroyo’s survival mode. Says Congressman Golez, “In the past few weeks, she’s been making all sorts of appointments of justices, board secretaries, board members agency heads and other officials for political accommodation. These have been appointment-intensive weeks. I pity the bureaucracy after this.” One such recent appointment is of the wife of a certain congressman from Bicol to the monetary board and its fat emoluments.

Golez preceded the Hyatt 10 when he took a stand within the hour of listening to the Garci Tapes, resigning his Cabinet position as National Security Adviser as early as June. He was also the first to ask indignant probing questions on who put the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines up to the wiretapping in the first place.

Now he is one to believe former DSWD Secretary Dinky Soliman’s revelation on the Palace’s hand in party list representative Rodante Marcoleta’s quick endorsement of the first weak impeachment case filed by lawyer Oliver Lozano. This ploy now turns out to have been first base in an overall game plan. Second base was nailed down in last Tuesday’s disqualification of both the better-prepared second case and the weak third case by legalistic debate on “form and substance.” Third base is dismissal of the Lozano complaint, the goal of the GMA team’s alleged new round of vote buying.

Meanwhile it emerges that Marcoleta, who endorsed the Lozano complaint, had actually been expelled from his membership in the party-list Alagad, which filed a case at the Comelec to revoke his nomination as their representative. Not only did the risk of losing his congressional seat make this party-list congressman as vulnerable to the blandishments of Arroyo handlers as your friendly neighborhood trapo. He may not even have been qualified to endorse the complaint!

“It’s a short-term survival game,” Golez observes about Mrs. Arroyo. “She’s suppressing public feeling and that’s sitting on top of a volcano. Eighty percent disapproval rating is well above boiling point, with 700,000 people who want to end her term by any means possible – that’s dangerous.”

And so a new rash of candle lighting rituals has begun, the way it did with NAMFREL and JoeCon in the 80s, this time by a new Bukluran ng Katotohanan (Coalition for Truth). This weekend, the Middle Forces have been gearing up, in two fora at the Ateneo and La Salle, for another stand against the odds created by another overstaying president to rival Ferdinand Marcos.

The ball is back in our lap, people. How much do we value the truth and a possible new beginning? It’s up to us now.