Alice L. Guo’s doom is a foregone conclusion.

Following the Senate’s diligent investigation into her alleged shadowy connections with an illegal POGO hub in Bamban town, Tarlac, Guo has been dismissed from office by the Ombudsman.

She is also facing tax evasion charges. She is also in hiding which, if the police fail to arrest her soon, means she’s flown the coop and is in exile somewhere.

While it is all over for Ms. Guo, we nonetheless need to give her due credit.

We do appreciate her notorious “I don’t remember” evasions which got the ball rolling to kick out all POGO operators and expose their friends in high and low places.

Not least of those POGO special friends is former presidential spokesperson Harry Roque who, in recent news reports, still hasn’t adequately acquitted himself of his alleged lawyerly entanglements in an illegal POGO.

Cocky Mr. Roque also recently got his comeuppance during a Lower House hearing on POGOs, his tiresome posture as an eminent legal luminary deflated by Rep. Gerville Lusitro, a relatively unknown lawmaker from Batangas.

Roque’s frayed self-esteem counted for less after Ms. Lusitro cast her net farther over the POGO mess to effortlessly net a big fish, former President Rodrigo Duterte.

Ms. Lusitro said the former leader “encroached” on the powers of Congress when he issued a suspiciously infirm executive order that created the POGOs.

Duterte, alleged Ms. Luistro, summarily legislated, amended, and repealed an existing PAGCOR law that hadn’t specifically mentioned POGOs.

Congress is still sorting out if Ms. Lusitro’s charge “violates the fundamental principle of separation of powers.” Mr. Duterte is notably silent on the issue.

Nevertheless, we are grateful for Ms. Luistro’s reminder of the previous regime’s cavalier treatment of our laws.

Still, some political truisms — insofar as telling us what really goes on in our current political system of a powerful presidency and a docile Lower House — loom large over her charge.

It is a commonplace political observation that in our present unreformed political system senators are the only ones who seemingly have the national political stature and clout to take on the president.

Which leaves, as one noted political commentator put it, the Lower House laboring under a cloud that it is “dependent on the presidency’s power to give or deny funding to districts, and it would only bare its fangs at those who dare challenge presidents.”

Nothing better illustrates the Lower House’s debased reputation than the recent rousing welcome given by scores of congressmen to arch Duterte critic, former Senator Leila de Lima, who when she spotlighted Duterte’s illegal drug war had to constantly parry derisive catcalls and misogynistic remarks from the same congressmen.

But the shoe obviously is now on the other foot. In the wake of Duterte’s and his staunch allies’ challenge of the incumbent, they’re now receiving the exact same derision De Lima endured from the solons minus, of course, the salivating catcalls.

Despite this obvious partisan-motivated drawback, it is still well and good the present Lower House is helping us form better judgments as to what the Duterte regime really was.

Of course, it would be altogether a different case if these same Lower House members can responsibly tell us if there’s anything askew in the present regime.

Anyway, if this succinctly portrays where the current Lower House is presently at, some congresspersons have nonetheless provided some degree of comfort in the way they have recently conducted themselves.

Considering that the typical congressperson’s self-preservation instincts still inform his or her exercise of their public responsibilities, it is refreshing that some congresspersons are showing signs that they’re capable of “persistence, diligence, superior staff work, astute questioning” in tackling a major national issue.

It’s an unexpected novel development which now perhaps allows us to harbor some small measure of guarded optimism that the Lower House still has a chance, though slight, of reclaiming its old institutional independent self.