Which hunt?

The administration is, once again, speaking with a forked tongue when it comes to the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte. While consistently and loudly professing its disinterest in the process, Malacañang, nonetheless, through its spokespersons, consistently and loudly defends each outlandish pronouncement from the House prosecution panel, as if more than a dozen talkative prosecutors and two mouthpieces (one of whom is really funny looking) are not enough to argue its cause.

Joining the fray over Senator Migz Zubiri calling the impeachment trial a “witch hunt,” the Palace used its official bully pulpit to call the senator out, saying that it was tantamount to a prejudgment.

The funny thing is that it was exactly what House prosecutor Lorenz Defensor said, almost to a word. Another funny thing is that Defensor, acting all self-righteous, bellowed that Zubiri shouldn’t say such things about an act of the Lower House, whose members he said (as if it weren’t obvious enough) were elected by the Filipino people. Defensor must have forgotten, in his haste to curry favor with his bosses, that Zubiri was also elected, and by millions of voters no less, across a nationwide constituency.

The House prosecution has been a constant source of bewilderment from the beginning. Professing a supposed commitment to expediting Duterte’s trial, it dragged its feet on the certification required by the impeachment court for the House to certify the impeachment complaint’s compliance with the constitutional requirement of one-impeachment-a-year.

Then, for the most mysterious of reasons, it refused to receive pleadings from the Duterte defense team, further throwing a monkey wrench in the proceedings. Thereafter, prosecutor Leila de Lima, still entertaining the illusion that she is a legal luminary, suddenly started some ululations about the certification requirements of the impeachment court being unconstitutional and ultra vires, while another prosecutor (Joel Chua), on the same day, said the House was doing its best to comply with them.

Then there were calls for the prosecution panel, on grounds of possible conflict of interest, to distance itself from one of its own, volunteer lawyer Lorna Kapunan, for representing Atong Ang in a potential multiple murder case. We know thee, chaotic, and thy name is the House of Representatives.

At any rate, the impeachment prosecutors scarcely have the right to take Senator Zubiri to task for speaking his mind, considering how, not only the prosecutors, but other members of the House (including non-lawyers who belong to the “Atty. Google” category) have been taking turns, almost non-stop, to make all sorts of press statements about the merits of the impeachment complaint.

These range from the sublime to the ridiculous; unfortunately, it is 99 percent the latter, which are hardly a source of edification. It must be from desperation, as recent polls have shown that a majority of Filipinos disagree with the impeachment.

And so people are asking, considering how thin the complaint is, and how pell-mell the prosecutors are, when you talk of the charges against the Vice President, and their legal strategy, which hunt are you talking about?