ership crisis, on the surface, was a vote. What actually resolved it, by every account from inside the august halls of the Senate, was the quiet kind of pressure applied to enough senators to manufacture a bloc friendly to the Palace.

Alan Peter Cayetano is out. Win Gatchalian is in. The administration calls this democracy in action. A more honest description is that it is a product of transactional politics.

The real story is what happens after the gavel changes hands, or the machinery of law turns, selectively, on whoever sits outside the winning bloc.

Consider the pattern. A senator absent from the chamber under a foreign warrant of arrest. Another who surrendered to face charges rather than hide from them.

Others with cases, plunder, graft, or whatever Damocles sword that is made to hang over their heads, suddenly active or threatened, timed with a precision that owes more to political expediency than accountability.

The Department of Justice, the Ombudsman, and the courts have learned to be on the same page as Malacañang.

This is the weaponization of the obscured leadership fight. It is not about who runs the Senate, but who gets to remain a senator dressed up as due process.

And it bears directly on the number that should have decided everything from the start, the denominator.

The Constitution was unambiguous about the Senate’s choice of its president: “by a majority vote of all its members.” It was stated to all and not merely to those present.

All twenty-four, regardless of who is in a cell, who is abroad, who has chosen not to show up. The Constitution does not contemplate a shrinking Senate that conveniently produces a quorum for whoever can clear the room of inconvenient votes, as threatens the Senate.

If that reading holds, then a leadership manufactured from a computation excluding sitting senators, however absent, however accused, is not merely irregular. It is illegitimate at its foundation, a government of the chamber assembled on a number that was never the right number.

The same-denominator puzzle is about to determine whether the impeachment trial of the Vice President proceeds on solid constitutional grounds or on a number rigged to produce the outcome the administration prefers.

If “all its members” can be redefined downward when it is convenient to elect a Senate President, it will be redefined downward again when it is convenient to secure a conviction or an acquittal.

The rule of law does not govern a government that wins by changing the meaning of words.

It is ruled by law, statute, and court warrants repurposed as instruments of removal rather than justice.

The senators currently free to vote should ask themselves who is missing from the room, since the answer to that question has a great bearing on the independence of the institution they represent.

The absent colleagues facing a manufactured docket will likely be the template for the equation that will be put into play in the bigger battle at the impeachment court.