Impeach mania fuels rage

As Filipinos grapple with the economic whiplash of rising prices driven by the Middle East conflict, frustration is mounting over the House of Representatives’ focus on efforts to unseat Vice President Sara Duterte amid a deepening crisis.

Retired Associate Justice Adolfo Azcuna warned that the chamber’s preoccupation risks an overreach.

The House Committee on Justice is now conducting what it describes as a “mini-trial,” issuing subpoenas for Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALNs), tax records, and witnesses, even as the Vice President’s camp continues to boycott the proceedings.

Azcuna conceded the House is still “confined” to its constitutional duty under Article XI, Section 3 of determining probable cause.

Yet he repeatedly flagged a dangerous crossover as the committee is “bordering on the role of the Senate to try the case.”

The Constitution draws a clear line: the House indicts, while the Senate tries an impeachment case.

The House’s 60-session-day window should not be used as a dress-rehearsal prosecution.

Probable cause is a deliberately low threshold since “a person of reasonable mind will think that there is probability or reason to believe that the offense was probably committed.”

It does not require full-blown evidentiary battles, cross-examination, or the compulsion of bank records that the Bank Secrecy Law bars.

Azcuna maintained that those records remain closed to a mere House investigating committee; only the Senate, sitting as an impeachment tribunal, can pierce the veil.

The committee’s aggressive document dragnet and witness list already strain that distinction.

In the impeachment proceedings against former President Joseph Estrada, the Senate opened the Jose Velarde account. The House never pretended it could.

The trial of the late Chief Justice Renato Corona followed the same process.

The current House’s pursuit is unprecedented as it is the first sustained Committee on Justice “hearing” with witnesses, clarificatory questions that edge toward cross-examination, and a trial-like process.

Azcuna held that an unexplained spike in SALN assets or the sudden 150-million-peso confidential-fund outlay in eleven days could, by themselves, meet the low bar of probable cause, precisely because the respondent does not explain, thus allowing VP Duterte’s impeachment and sending the complaint to the Senate.

It becomes constitutionally corrosive when the House lingers for the full 60 session days, three hearings a week, turning inquiry into a spectacle.

When the House drifts into evidentiary overkill, it usurps the Senate’s exclusive judicial function, blurs the separation of powers, and cheapens the process into a serial media event.

Worse, it invites the very Supreme Court intervention that already nullified one impeachment complaint against Duterte.

The Tribunal’s clarified rules for such complaints still demand fidelity to probable cause, not a pre-trial.

Azcuna cautioned the House against overreach as it flirts with constitutional trespass.

He issued a reminder that even noble ends do not justify extra-constitutional means. The committee’s defenders insist they are “just following the rules.”

The rules, however, were never meant to let the House conduct a shadow trial before the Senate had even received the articles of impeachment.

Subpoenas for SALNs and BIR data will turn every hearing into a prosecutorial showcase while denying the respondent a meaningful defense.

When the House begins to behave like a court, demanding explanations that the Vice President has already declined to provide, it ceases to be an impeaching body and becomes a kangaroo court.

It becomes a test case for every future Vice President, President, or Chief Justice who will inherit a precedent from the House that stretches its 60-day session mandate into a protracted public inquisition.

If the committee cannot discipline itself, the plenary must. If the plenary will not, the Supreme Court eventually will do it for the chamber.

The impeachment process should not be turned into an abomination for vengeance dressed in parliamentary robes.

The House must stop at probable cause; anything more is an overreach.