Wrong man, twice over

Wrong man, twice over | Daily Tribune

Had the trial of VP Duterte pushed through last year, Escudero would have been the presiding officer.

This is the second act for a man whose first turn in that chair resulted in the constitutional crisis that needed the Supreme Court to resolve.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has defended Escudero’s capacity to preside over this next trial, although Senate President Win Gatchalian, who is not a lawyer, has said the decision isn’t final.

The President also pinned the 2025 trial’s collapse on the SC’s ruling on the one-year bar rule, not on Escudero.

Recent developments, however, militate against Escudero taking a central role in the new trial.

Escudero was aligned with former Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano’s bloc until he attended the 3 June Senate session that led to a leadership shakeup, during which key Senate posts were declared vacant. Gatchalian then was elected Senate president pro tempore.

The proposal to make Escudero the presiding officer this time was rumored to be part of a quid pro quo.

His first run as trial presiding officer ended with the articles of impeachment against Duterte being sent back to the House for “constitutional infirmities.” Before that, he figured in a controversy for his use of the word “forthwith” in determining when the trial should start.

In his concurring and dissenting opinion in Generillo Jr. v. Senate of the Philippines, SC Senior Associate Justice Marvic Leonen dismantled Escudero’s handling of the 2025 proceedings.

Leonen’s central argument was that the Senate, as an impeachment court, could only set the pace of the trial. As he put it, when a Senate president announces, in his legislative capacity, that no trial will happen during the recess, he is “substituting legislative convenience for constitutional command.”

Escudero’s February 2025 announcement was made before the Senate court even existed. Leonen called this a “practical veto over the accountability mechanism” the Constitution placed in the people’s hands.”

He wrote that such a veto “finds no support in the text, structure, or history of Article XI” of the 1987 Constitution or in the Accountability of Public Officers that established the framework that ensures that public servants remain answerable to the public.

The word at the center of the dispute, Leonen argued, was “forthwith” which, he contended, “demands immediacy not as to the completion of a complex trial, but as to the convening of the impeachment court and the commencement of the constitutional process.”

The Senate president’s only job upon receiving the Articles of Impeachment is to put the matter on the floor immediately, “within, at most, the next session day.”

Everything else — continuances, recesses, accommodations for “national urgency” — belongs to the court once it is seated, not to the Senate president acting alone.

The 126-day gap between Escudero’s receiving the impeachment articles and convening the Senate impeachment court, Leonen wrote bluntly, “sets a standard that I find incompatible with the text, purpose, and history of Article XI.”

Interpreting the Constitution’s command to act “forthwith” as allowing a four-month delay, he warned, tells Filipinos “that their highest law yields to institutional convenience” and renders the framers’ deliberate choice of the word “effectively meaningless” for “those who are most powerful and most in need of its discipline.”

Yet the Senate majority now appears poised to entrust the court’s leadership once again to the same man, returning the gavel that the late Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile once wielded with marked independence.