Advocate's Overview: 3rd impeachment against GMA

By ARTHUR L. ALLAD-IW

The latest dismissal on Thursday by the House Committee on Justice on the third impeachment try against Pres. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo showed how the impeachment process is being bastardized by allies of GMA. Instead of allowing the supplemental complaint filed by Adel Tamano to be a part of the Pulido complaint, the Committee on Justice thrashed the Tamano supplement. Then the Committee’s next move was to vote, 43 in favor and 1 against, that the Pulido complaint is insufficient in substance.

The Committee report declaring the Pulido complaint as insufficient in substance will still be submitted to the House plenary for approval or not. Nevertheless, the composition of the House (dominated by GMA allies, like within the Committee) would favor the adoption of the report. And this shows in concrete terms the mockery of our justice system through the dictates by the majority party.

It must be pointed out that impeachment is a constitutional process as defined in the 1987 constitution. However, its weakness is that it left the appreciation of an impeachment case to a very politicized institution – Congress – which will hardly be fair in appreciating any valid complaint, whatever angle we look at it. Tyranny of numbers can dictate the process, without these House members being obliged to consider the real substance of any complaint against an impeachable official. They can always thrash an impeachment complaint based on their political affiliation – like the two impeachment cases filed against GMA.

There is another weakness in interpreting one complaint allowed per year by the dominant members of the House. They believe that when a complaint is first filed, it prohibits any other complaint to be filed within that same year. This was also exploited by GMA allies in the three impeachment cases. And it serves as a precedent where impeachable official can always maneuver himself out of danger by filing a weak and easily dismissed complaint just to have the impeachable official free from any complaint in a year.

The impeachment complaints filed against GMA have been an eye opener. First, a complaint will never prosper as long as an impeachable official has the numbers in Congress. To have that number is so easy to do. Just give them money as their advance Christmas gift or birthday gift. But doing so just to kill an impeachment complaint is, I believe, the worst act of denying what is due the people by their so-called representatives. I believe too that this is not the spirit that the framers of the 1987 constitution intended when they wrote the impeachment provisions.

Second, an impeachable official can now bribe anybody to file a weak complaint to exclude other stronger complaints that may lead to the conviction of an impeachable official. Look at the complaints filed by Oliver Lozano (2006) and Pulido (2007). The complaints were filed earlier than the others but were considered weak enough on the substance of their allegations.

But the Pulido complaint, weak as it was initially, should have made a difference since Pulido adopted the Adel Tamano complaint as a supplement. Therefore it should have been part of the original Pulido complaint like in any other complaint where such is allowed to strengthen the substance of the complaint. And based on news reports, there is no clear rule by the House on the issue of supplementing an original complaint.

This may be an indication that the Committee on Justice committed an abuse of discretion as they failed to include, without justifiable reason, the supplement as part of the original complaint. This can be a test case that can be brought to the Supreme Court to decide once and for all if the said act of a GMA-dominated Lower House is not an abuse of discretion.

I hope that this can be done, particularly now that the Supreme Court has increasingly shown signs of being an activist court. I believe that some leading SC justices, at least, know the meaning of justice which the dominant bloc in the Lower House lacks. #