Gaming the system

“When the rules bend, so does justice.” This lesson percolates among those who have followed the trial of Vice President Sara Duterte and its recent high point: soliciting the views of imminent Supreme Court magistrates.

When a country writes into its Constitution that convicting one of the highest elected officials requires 16 out of 24 senators, it does so because the authors fear a time when those in power may want a conviction badly enough to change the count.

The framers knew that impeachment could become a weapon instead of a safeguard. They set the bar high on purpose, and moving that bar now, in the middle of a trial, should worry anyone who still believes in fair process, whether or not they support Vice President Duterte.

Strip away the legal language, and what is being proposed looks less like a constitutional interpretation and more like a tacit political crusade.

With senators sympathetic to the Vice President now in detention and others facing intense pressure through charges that surfaced only after they resisted political persuasion, the push to lower the vote threshold has intensified.

The sequence is difficult to ignore. Reduce the number of senators available to vote, then lower the votes needed to convict.

Once “all members,” as provided in the constitutional provision on the two-thirds vote to convict, can mean fewer members, the principle can be used again against anyone, in a future trial, for any reason a sitting government finds convenient.

Retired Associate Justice Adolfo Azcuna made the argument for not allowing the number to drift: The Constitution’s framers, of whom he was one, had the American model in front of them, which counts only the senators “present,” and yet they deliberately removed that word when writing the Philippine version, which means they wanted the full membership counted, present or not, detained or not.

What makes this moment more troubling is the pattern behind it: Although senators from both the majority and the minority have been named in connection with the flood control corruption scandal, the non-bailable charges, the kind that can conveniently remove a senator-judge from the chamber, have so far landed only on senators seen as leaning toward the Vice President, while senators who once faced similar scrutiny found their cases quietly fade after switching sides.

A blitzkrieg of cases targeted minority senators who resisted the pressure to turncoat.

Because that pattern is difficult to explain as coincidence, it is equally difficult to separate it from the renewed push to lower the impeachment threshold. The two developments appear to feed into each other.

First, remove enough sympathetic senators from the room. Then argue that the room itself has shrunk. Finally, claim that a lower number is now the fair one.

Bending the meaning of “all members” in an impeachment case could quietly hand future leaders a template for manipulation, one that could be adapted to efforts to change the Constitution itself by using lawfare to sweep aside those who stand in the way.

The question before the Senate impeachment court, therefore, is bigger than Vice President Duterte’s guilt or innocence. It is whether Filipinos want rules that remain fixed regardless of who holds power, or rules that flex to fit whoever holds power.

Due process protects everyone, but it works only if the count agreed upon at the beginning of the trial remains the one used at the end.

Once that number can be moved under pressure, the precedent is set for moving it again and for a far more sinister agenda.