Absent without shame

There is a particular kind of arrogance in asking the people you are accused of betraying to also feed your lawyers.

That, in essence, is what the Office of the Vice President did when it wrote Senate President Sherwin Gatchalian requesting that the chamber shoulder the catering costs for Sara Duterte’s defense team, and that only the OVP’s accredited caterer be allowed to serve them in the Vice President’s designated holding room.

Senator Panfilo Lacson, an expert in procurement law, flagged two provisions in the letter as potential violations of government bidding rules. The Senate already employs a caterer selected through a legal competitive bidding process. Funneling public funds to a rival agency’s contractor under the guise of “security” — a pretext that convinces absolutely no one — is not a protective measure. It is an outright money grab.

Multiply that pettiness across the length of this impeachment trial and a pattern emerges, one far more damning than the catering request itself.

Duterte stands accused of amassing unexplained wealth, of misusing confidential funds, of threatening to have the President, the First Lady and the former House Speaker killed.

The National Bureau of Investigation has testified that it evaluated a documented pattern of violence behind that threat. The impeachment court has subpoenaed her bank, tax, and AMLC records going back to 2007. This is not a technicality working its way through committee. This is a sitting Vice President accused of plotting to assassinate the head of state.

And where is she? Not in the courtroom. Not answering the charges herself. She left for Europe, ostensibly to visit her father, who is himself in The Hague awaiting trial for, allegedly, crimes against humanity.

Reports now place her in The Hague as well, on government-approved travel, while National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) officials testify in Pasay City about her alleged capacity to make good on threats against the President’s life.

Her security detail travels with her. Her retinue travels with her. She has stated that none of this is at public expense. Well, show us the receipts and the source of the funds.

This is the tell. A public official confident in her innocence fights for her name in the room where the fight is happening. She does not delegate her defense to lawyers while she tends to family business abroad, unbothered, as though the highest court of accountability in the land were background noise.

The catering letter and the travel itinerary are not separate stories. They are the same story: an official who treats the machinery of the state, its Senate, its funds, its taxpayers as instruments that exist to serve her comfort, not to judge her conduct.

None of this decides guilt on the four articles before the impeachment court. That determination belongs to the senator-judges, and it should rest on the bank records, the NBI testimony and the evidence still being weighed.

But character is not irrelevant to that judgment. A Vice President who cannot be bothered to show up, who tries to bill the Senate for her comfort mid-trial, tells the country plainly how much regard she has for the institutions asking her to account for herself.

The Senate should deny the catering request without a caucus vote needed to see why. And it should hurry the evidence along, because a country cannot afford to have its second-highest official treat impeachment as an inconvenience to be managed from a hotel room in The Hague.

As the proceedings drag on, another question becomes increasingly difficult to ignore: Can the nation afford a process that many now view as exhausting, polarizing and seemingly without end?