Bankrupt, spent rerun

The House Committee on Justice has found a new prop for its long-running impeachment drama, and it is depressingly familiar.

A sealed box, said to contain the income tax returns and related documents of Vice President Sara Duterte and her husband, Manases Carpio, was presented and became the center of the “kabuki” presentation on live television.

After much posturing and debate, the panel deferred the opening of the box following “further legal review.”

The Bureau of Internal Revenue officials, who were in on the theatrical script, had reminded the lawmakers of confidentiality rules.

The box now sits untouched under House custody, while the public is once again invited to hold its breath for revelations that may prove as anticlimactic as the last.

This is not the first time Filipinos have been asked to treat a sealed container as the key to the national destiny and the climax of a telenovela.

In the 2001 impeachment trial of President Joseph Estrada, prosecutors hyped up a “second envelope” as the smoking gun to plunder. The senator-judges’ refusal to open it during the trial ignited the protest that became EDSA 2.

After Estrada had resigned from office, the envelope was opened on 14 February 2001 on the initiative of then Senate President Nene Pimentel in the presence of local and foreign media.

When the envelope’s contents were examined, they delivered far less than the manufactured frenzy had promised. Never mind, as it had already served its purpose of booting out Estrada.

The episode stood as a textbook case of how legislative spectacle can substitute for sober inquiry.

The House Committee on Justice, now conducting the so-called clarificatory hearings against Vice President Duterte, appears determined to stage the sequel.

The impeachment complaint against Duterte has already been entangled in constitutional timing disputes and the unmistakable scent of political payback in the Duterte-Marcos rift.

By turning routine tax documents into a cliffhanger, complete with a ceremonial signing, televised debate and a vote to keep the box closed, lawmakers have revived the same tactic of building public anticipation through mystery and delay.

The actual records, accessible through statements of assets and liabilities and anti-money laundering channels, could have been examined quietly and methodically. Instead, it was packaged as theater. Such proceedings are a classic moro-moro, the traditional Filipino folk drama of mock battles, scripted heroes and villains, and ritualized resolution that never quite delivers substance.

In modern Philippine politics, the term has come to describe any performative exercise in which form triumphs over fact.

The sealed-box routine fits the genre perfectly: props are deployed, tension is manufactured, headlines are secured, and the real work of accountability is relegated to secondary status.

When, or if, the box is finally opened, expect the familiar pattern: selective media leaks, partisan spin and a collective shrug from those who remember the Estrada envelope’s disappointing conclusion.

Congressional oversight of public officials’ finances is a serious responsibility, but turning it into a ratings-driven morality play cheapens that duty.

The House panel is merely reenacting the 2001 Estrada spectacle. Impeachment and legislative inquiry are constitutional mechanisms meant to serve the public interest, not to entertain them.

The committee, in full view of the inquisitive public, had merely eroded its credibility to below zero with the zarzuela.