MANILA, Philippines—The House committee on justice Wednesday cleared the way for formal deliberations on the fourth impeachment case against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in three years after quickly dismissing a motion for intervention and two other complaints.
Voting 35-4, the committee threw out after lengthy and heated debates a move by a group of bloggers headed by columnist Manuel Quezon III to strengthen the main complaint filed by businessman Jose “Joey” de Venecia III.
The bloggers wanted to include as a ground for impeachment the memorandum of agreement (MOA) on ancestral domain with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which the Supreme Court declared as unconstitutional last month.
Also spiked were cases lodged separately by private lawyers Guillermo Sotto and Oliver Lozano after De Venecia had filed his complaint.
The House is required by the Constitution to consider only one impeachment complaint against the President in one year. In the past three years, there has been an annual race to be first to file a case against Ms Arroyo whose allies have managed to kill three previous attempts to oust her.
Quezon City Rep. Matias Defensor, committee chair, shrugged off suggestions he was working on a deadline to wrap up the impeachment hearing within the next two weeks even though his panel had been dispensing its business with uncommon haste.
De Venecia said that by moving to get rid of his complaint quickly, the House wanted to focus on amending the Constitution to extend Ms Arroyo’s term, which expires in 2010.
“I hate to say this but this is all part of the script, they want to rush its dismissal to tackle the most important legislative work of all—Charter change,” De Venecia said.
He said the rise of administration ally Juan Ponce Enrile as Senate president could also be seen as laying the groundwork for amending the Constitution through a constituent assembly before 2010.
Quezon called the rejection of his motion an “assassination” of a legitimate move to strengthen the case to impeach President Arroyo. (Quezon is a Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist, but his action did not necessarily reflect this paper’s intentions.)
“They know that the Mindanao bloc, the Ilonggo congressmen have strong sentiments against the MOA and they know they will lose because the culpability of the President is clear,” Quezon said.
1-year bar rule
But Defensor stood his ground. “We are willing to face them anywhere even in the Supreme Court. The topic is different, it is in the nature of a different impeachment complaint,” he said.
Debates centered on accepting additional complaints after the De Venecia case had been received and the propriety of bolstering it with the emergence of a new cause of action after the complaint had been filed. The court ruling on the MOA was issued after De Venecia went to the House.
“These complaints are all subject to the constitutionally imposed one-year bar rule after an impeachment complaint has been properly and seasonably initiated,” Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman said.
The majority reiterated that the committee should entertain only one impeachment case with a definite set of charges that would remain unchanged throughout the proceedings.
Recital of facts
De Venecia’s complaint was ruled as sufficient in form in the first stage of the committee’s deliberation on Tuesday. The second stage will be a recital of facts on Ms Arroyo’s alleged culpable violations of the Constitution. It was scheduled Thursday, but the congressmen later agreed to reset it for next week after the minority requested more time.
Charter change
Among the causes of action cited by De Venecia, namesake son of the deposed House Speaker Jose de Venecia Jr., were the P728-million fertilizer scam, the botched $329-million NBN-ZTE deal, bribing congressmen to kill last year’s impeachment complaint and human rights violations.
Defensor said the committee was keen on getting the specific and not general charges and circumstances of the acts which the President was being held culpable.
Defensor denied that his panel was attempting to railroad the case and get it over with by Dec. 2 or 3. He said that after the recital of facts, Ms Arroyo would be given notice to reply to the charges and the committee would then hear the evidence.
Bayan Muna party-list Rep. Teodoro Casińo insisted that Defensor had made it “doubly difficult” to impeach the President by demanding that the complainant prove there was probable cause when the current stage only required a simple recital of facts.
“It’s as if you want us to prove that GMA (Ms Arroyo) is guilty beyond reasonable doubt,” said Casińo who noted that the House had yet to go beyond this stage in the previous impeachment cases that he claimed were flawed.
