Caged by the law

Caged by the law | Daily Tribune

The law is a peculiar thing, not something like the Ten Commandments — engraved in stone, immutable, unyielding, universal. You would think the law stands as an eternal edifice, resisting the elements of time and politics.

But if such a notion is true, then lawyers would have gone the way of alchemists — quaint, obsolete, unnecessary. And law schools would be museums. But they’re not.

They’re thriving, churning out barristers and juris doctors by the thousands, all armed with the same constitution, the same statutes, the same jurisprudence — and a hundred different ways of interpreting them.

Case in point: the impeachment case against Vice President Sara Duterte for alleged misuse of confidential funds and threats issued against the President, First Lady and Speaker Martin Romualdez.

Comes now election lawyer Romulo Macalintal, veteran of many battles and survivor of many constitutional storms, saying that this particular ship has sailed. The Senate, under the Congress ending on 30 June, he argues, simply no longer has time to render a verdict on Duterte.

The impeachment articles, while filed as early as February, have not even made it to the Senate floor. By the time the senators put on their quasi-judicial robes and begin to hear the case — on 3 June, according to Senate President Francis Escudero — they’ll already be halfway out the door. That’s not even a trial; that’s a wake.

Macalintal invokes Rule 44 of the Senate — that all pending matters die with the Congress that spawned them. No reincarnation clause. No afterlife. When the curtain falls, the play ends. But not so fast, say other legal minds.

One lawyer, for one, isn’t quite ready to sound the death knell. What matters, he says, is not when the trial begins, but when the complaint was initiated and transmitted. The House filed it, the Senate received it. The process, by that reading, is alive — perhaps comatose, perhaps wheezing — but not dead. The Constitution, after all, limits the filing of new complaints against the same official within a year. It doesn’t say you can’t pick up where you left off.

Former Supreme Court spokesperson Theodore Te goes even further, suggesting that using procedural timing as a fig leaf for inaction smells suspiciously like evasion. If accountability is the goal — and it is, or was, or should be — then shouldn’t the priority be the substance of the allegations rather than the tick of the legislative clock?

And Christian Monsod, who helped write the very Constitution these men now parse, has always warned against turning rules into cages. The point of the law, he reminds us, is justice. Otherwise, we risk becoming a nation of technicians — great at form, terrible at soul.

So who’s right? All of them. None of them. It depends.

The law, as someone once quipped, is like a violin. You can draw it across the strings and produce music — or you can drag it across a case and produce grating noise. It’s a tool. It yields to the hand that wields it. And the truth is, most times, that hand is not blind like Lady Justice’s. It sees power. It sees interest. It sees alliances and enemies and timing and elections and public opinion.

If the law could only be interpreted one way, we wouldn’t have courts. We wouldn’t have oral arguments. We wouldn’t have dissenting opinions. We wouldn’t have the spectacle of two lawyers quoting the same provision and coming to opposite conclusions. We wouldn’t even have lawyers. Just a book on a shelf somewhere and a librarian to read it aloud.

But that’s not how it works. Especially not here. Especially not now.

In the end, this impeachment case — like all great national dramas — won’t be decided by logic alone. It will be decided by the balance of politics and principle, of will and word, of the written rule and the silent understanding that sometimes rules bend. The Constitution is a compass, yes. But we often use it like a mirror.

Sara Duterte may or may not face trial. The Senate may or may not have time. The law may or may not say what you think it says. It depends on who’s reading. It depends on what they want it to mean. It depends. That’s not a flaw in the law. That’s the practice of it.