“In the Philippines, impeachment happens all the time, as if it was really a part of the political post-election process.

President Donald Trump was impeached Wednesday on charges of abuse of power and obstructing Congress by a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. This is something we saw coming based from last year’s United States elections that brought in a “blue wave” of Democrat House members to the US Congress, and elevated Rep. Nancy Pelosi to become Speaker of the House.

Talks on impeachment are interesting for us because it’s a political process that we are all very familiar with in the Philippines.

This writer was in the US last year at the International Visitors Leadership Program of the State Department, to immerse ourselves in how the US does its elections in relation to our study on Federalism and Democracy. The delegates were from the Asia Pacific, and yours truly was the only Filipino to be part of the group. We got to talk to Republicans and Democrats in what were known as blue and red states, and even observe how elections were conducted. When the initial results came in, no one expected that many Democrats to win, and that early, there was already talk of a looming impeachment now with a majority of “blues” in Congress. Now here we are.

In the Philippines, impeachment happens all the time, as if it was really a part of the political post-election process. Here, it is either the loser’s camp filing an impeachment complaint against the winners from the previous election, or the winners filing against the politicians who remain in power that are allied with the losers. It has come to a point that a Juan de la Cruz files a flimsy impeachment complaint in the House to put the one-year prohibition in effect since the 1987 Constitution provides that “no impeachment proceedings shall be initiated more than once in a period of one year.” This practice has been curbed by the House Justice Committee’s internal rules as to when a “proceeding” begins, which is different from the actual filing of the complaint.

In the US, impeachment is taken very seriously and it doesn’t happen too often. President Trump is only the third president to be impeached, the recent one would be President Bill Clinton. When the Trump impeachment hearings started, one of the more exciting portions for me (as a legal geek) was when the Committee on Justice invited constitutional scholars from four of the top universities in the US to give their take if the acts committed by President Trump were impeachable the way the founding fathers of America envisioned it. The discussion was academic, educational, with seemingly no taint of politics, yet of course the Republicans decried this as the Democrats’ laying the predicate and framing the public’s minds on the alleged guilt of President Trump.

When the impeachment vote was handed down, President Trump was in the middle of a rally in Michigan. He berated the Democrats in Congress with how this “election invalidation” has been pulled off. His impeachment undermined the electoral vote, the will of the people, that brought him to the presidency, in violation of the Constitution. Back in DC, the Democrats hailed the Constitution as most victorious with the impeachment results. They said with the President’s wielding of the power of his office for self-gain, impeachment became necessary.

This led me to think if the framers of our 1987 Constitution envisioned the impeachment process to be utilized the way it is being done in present day. Ours is still admittedly a young Constitution, and the framers were perhaps more idealistic than a majority of Filipinos today. Our Constitution was enacted in haste, traumatized after years under martial law and the dictatorial rule of the Marcoses. In the same vein, we should see if the framers are still satisfied with how the Constitution’s provisions have played out in the 32 years, such as the partylist system, the Filipinized economic provisions and term limits.

At this juncture, may I share my position that constitutional change, or at least a thorough study and discussion of the present state of the 1987 Constitution, is absolutely necessary. If laws have oversight provisions authorizing legislators to see how these are being implemented, the same oversight should be done with our Constitution. The most recent call for constitutional amendment was put in a bad light because the term extension of House members and senators was included, which should not have been done so, though this is more of a PR strategy. What the general public has to understand is that there are more important provisions in the 1987 Constitution that should be updated, and it is the Filipino people that will vote on it anyway once the amendments are subjected to a national plebiscite. Thus, fear not the constitutional amendments since the final say still remains with the people.