HOTSPOT
If anyone told us soon after the May 2022 elections that by October 2024, there would be marathon hearings in the House and Senate holding the Duterte administration accountable, nobody would have believed it.
Neither would we believe any prediction then that Congress would take on Sara Duterte, who was enjoying the afterglow of an election landslide, and anticipating that the presumptive President appoint her as secretary of defense.
It was simply impossible to believe, given the apparent supermajority enjoyed by the Uniteam in the House and the Senate. Only a few oppositionists led by Makabayan’s France Castro, Arlene Brosas and Raoul Manuel managed to win in the House, and only Risa Hontiveros won in the Senate.
But here we are now in October 2024, with Congress investigating suspected Chinese criminal elements purportedly allowed into the country during the Duterte administration, the former President’s brutal drug war, and the Vice President’s questionable spending while she was Secretary of Education.
In a break from his predecessor, the President declared in his State of the Nation Address an end to POGOs.
Speaker Martin Romualdez is flexing the power of Congress. He is showing how Congress could govern the nation, set the national agenda, and influence the President on what’s best to do.
Through the House appropriations committee, we discovered the impeachable offenses of the Vice President and saw the House protect the budget as it should. Although the deputy minority leader, it was ACT Teachers Representative Castro who was given the first opportunity to question Vice President and former Education Secretary Duterte.
More than a billion in vice presidential pork has since been rechanneled by the appropriations committee in favor of the health and social welfare department.
Through the QuadComm, families of victims of extrajudicial killings see a glimmer of hope about attaining justice, while the movers and shakers of the drug war have been put in panic mode.
It may be only a matter of days or weeks before an impeachment complaint is filed against the Vice President for betrayal of public trust.
That’s not the fault of Romualdez, the majority lawmakers, or even Makabayan. They were not the ones who misspent public funds for a personal book. Neither did they spend or refuse to explain how hundreds of millions in confidential funds were spent in a span of days. The handful of pro-Duterte lawmakers cannot risk everything to explain on behalf of the Vice President who herself refuses to explain. Not even her brother, a House member, has come to her aid.
As for the former president, the livestreamed and telecast proceedings of the QuadComm are surely being recorded by the families and supporters of drug war victims, for possible reference in local legal proceedings, and submission to the International Criminal Court. It is also possible that the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor is paying close attention to the hearings, recording each minute.
Over at the Senate, it is often overlooked that senators elected deputy minority leader Hontiveros as chair of a committee. She has kept the chair of the Committee on Women, Children, Family Relations and Gender Equality, even as the Senate presidency changed hands from Juan Miguel Zubiri to Francis Escudero. Not one senator has come forward to scuttle her hearings to save the Dutertes.
Senator Bato dela Rosa, the former police chief in the first years of the drug war, has recently expressed interest in holding his own hearings as counterpoint to the House QuadComm proceedings. But Escudero has shut it down even before Bato could bang the gavel.
Right now, I don’t think it would be difficult to find 107 House members, or one more than a third of the House membership, to sign and file a verified complaint/resolution impeaching Vice President Duterte. When this happens, the complaint/resolution would be the articles of impeachment to be transmitted to the Senate for trial.
Duterte must then find eight senators to vote against the impeachment. It might be too difficult to accomplish.
Surely, there’s a sense of public mistrust towards lawmakers and among lawmakers themselves. The Dutertes, the Chinese infiltrators and criminal gangsters, and the death squads are capitalizing on this cynical view to evade accountability.
Billions in public funds are at stake, many are concerned by foreign criminal control of local governments, and tens of thousands of families are demanding justice. The openings for justice and for course correction provided by the House and the Senate cannot be understated.
We must support Congress when they do good work, and in this instance, they are doing good work. Seemingly unbelievable, but it is what it is.