(Un)due process of law

The ascent of one Chiz to and descent of one Migz from the Senate presidency resembles the “game of musical chairs.” How can one forget the famous line in the movie, “Clear and Present Danger,” where the actor said: “Am not going to be left without a chair when the music stops.”

Quite dramatically in the tug-of-war between Sen. Juan Miguel Zubiri and Sen. Francis Escudero, the “whole thing was over before it even started.” The President and Chiz had a prior conversation as an antecedent event.

There’s a popular sub-thematic teaching in the public administration discipline that every student and scholar would best remember, viz., “public policy is one that government does or does not do.”

When a bureaucrat simply denies any direct or indirect participation in a crucial event despite knowledge of it, perhaps it was meant to wear away or cushion the negative impact of an unsettling dilemma.

When the President admits prior knowledge of the move to unseat Zubiri yet denies a hand in it, then it’s like the usual rhetoric or what Meier calls the “politics of the first order.” It is high time to start the debate on whether Senate presidents should be elected at the start of each Congress or if Senate coups could be an alternative mechanism to unseat an incumbent in the middle of a session akin to changing horses in midstream.

There’s an immediate historical pattern this precedent demonstrates. It was also in May 2018 or two years after when then Sen. Vicente Sotto replaced Sen. Koko Pimentel.

Again, two years after Migz sat as Senate President, Chiz staged a coup and became the new occupant. The grand formality present when a Senate President is elected at the start of Congress is replaced by the unorthodox informality when a Senate President is elected via a coup.

It cannot be oversimplified as simply the internal dynamics of the Senate membership because the office is the institution itself, not the person who can launch a successful power grab. No doubt, Chiz had always waited for this time when he would have the numbers.

On a lighter note, one Rep. Rodante Marcoleta issued “unsolicited advice” to the senators throwing caution to the wind in the case of Mayor Alice Guo. Quite hesitatingly, his thoughts essentially sprung from his good mastery of the legal profession as well as disciplinary insights in public policy as a pracademic (practicing academic). After all, he does not only hold a doctorate degree in public administration or is a Harvard fellow for nothing.

In a TV program, he discussed with two anchors the basic parameters for conducting a Senate inquiry and, in the main, the observance of the constitutional right to due process. He cited 1) a clear legislative purpose and 2) the doctrine of pertinency as the two requirements for a valid Senate inquiry and as the legal parameters established by jurisprudence (i.e., Supreme Court decisions).

In effect, since the inquiry proceeded in the manner that it did, Marcoleta best described it as not just a fishing expedition but a “trawling expedition;” argued that the title or subject of Senate Resolution 977 had nothing about Alice Guo and, therefore, the parameters of inquiry, whatever the findings may be, are derived from a poisonous tree. In fact, it should be the operatives who raided the POGO and the other agencies involved that should have been investigated, PAGCOR not the least.

Thus, this non-observance of the right to due process when the inquiry entirely digressed from the subject matter of the referenced resolution and any “footnote” thereto, it then becomes a case of the cart pulling the horse.

In other words, the Senate inquiry should necessarily state its legislative purpose, stick to the title and theme contained in the Senate resolution, and apply legal parameters so the evidence gathered has a direct relation and connection to the subject matter of the inquiry.