by Diego Morra
That pretty much describes the decision of the Supreme Court (SC) to junk three petitions questioning the constitutionality of the Senate’s vote to stick to the 2/3 threshold for conviction of Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio as vice president based on the number of senators who participate, deliberate and vote on the basis of the evidence produced, validated and never debunked during the trial. As far as the Senate was concerned, senators who are under the jurisdiction of the courts and are deprived of their liberty cannot participate in the deliberations leading to a decision.
The High Tribunal dismissed the petitions filed by Vic Rodriguez, Berteni Causing and Ernesto Francisco on procedural grounds and for their lack of standing to sue. Without locus standi, the petitioners cannot obtain the relief they are seeking. Moreover, the SC is not empowered to grant a plea to reverse a decision made by a co-equal branch empowered by the 1987 Constitution as the sole institution tasked with the duty of conducting the impeachment trial. Determining the threshold for conviction is a function that only the Senate can exercise. Thus, the petitioners failed to dial the right number. To reverse the Senate ruling as an impeachment court, the petitioners should have sought relief from the very institution they insisted had committed a grievous error. It’s a no-brainer.
Just like the other case which holds Sara is immune from suit because she is an impeachable officer, Duterte lawyers apparently are suffering from dyslexia, or could not accept the reality that they should read from left to right, and even start thinking with their heads and not with their mouths. They want to place Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio into a bubble where she alone can exist, free from the hassles of real life and the strictures of law and common sense. Who is the superior legal mind combing through all the issues raised, the evidence adduced and the legal remedies that Sara can invoke to wiggle her way out of a cul-de-sac of her own making? Her own father-in-law is supposed to be helping out along with other Davao de campanilla lawyers. Estelito “Titong” Mendoza has already bought the farm and other legal luminaries are busy enjoying their retirement to be bothered.
Yet, the Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio troll army is trying to turn a tragedy into a comedy, redecorating a judicial defeat into a false victory and claiming that the SC junked the impeachment trial itself. Their social media posts are alarming for being egregiously false and should be subjected to sanctions by the High Court. For its part, the Senate should punish the Sara camp for not holding its horses and allowing its keyboard warriors to propagate lies. But then, the Dutertes are not known to be the apothegm of a virtuous political dynasty, nor are they exemplars of urbanidad. They may be shackled to their jail cells but they cannot, as reiterated by Sara, be chained to the virtues of sincerity and honesty, both of which, by their reckoning, are not needed in their political warlordism.
Back in 2022, Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio was a nationally unknown quantity, even as she was known to pack pistols left and right, the more, the merrier, to hunt down the enemies of mankind in every nook and cranny of Davao City, and between them, the Carpio couple owned nearly 60 firearms, just the right number to sustain a private army. All told, the Duterte political dynasty owns more than 600 firearms, beating Bato de la Rosa’s 120. Only the biggest private security agencies could own more weapons (save for automatic rifles) and many of them are owned by former military generals or police officers. Reminds us of a notorious scion of a controversial politician who grew up in a weapons arsenal in the company of armed bodyguards but who was cut down to size by another scion of a strongman. Showing that she is not ready to quit, she continues to question why Ferdinand Marcos Jr. hasn’t’ resigned despite presiding over a corrupt regime and failing to ease the pain of millions of citizens.
Sara displayed not only extreme paranoia by sensing that everyone threatens her and that she could not trust anybody, the police, the military, even her own bodyguards. If the entire government threatens her, why is she in such a great hurry to take over the regime? If you despise it, why embrace it? Analysts now fear that a specter must be haunting Sara, the specter of diffidence that could turn into self-hatred in the long-run if she fails to achieve what she had set out to accomplish. Her contract with destiny—to become the president of this land—is now threatened with destruction as the impeachment trial uncovers more and more evidence of her deliberate embezzlement of public funds, the tale of larceny from Mindanao to Luzon being proven by a paper trail and the logorrhea of her own brother Baste, the unexplained parking of billions of pesos in DepEd money, the missing rewards for ghost informers and the outright defalcation through her minions.
As the impeachment trial grinds on, and the Sara defense panel perorates about its trivial legal pursuits, taxpayers who religiously monitor the impeachment trial now sense that the walls are closing in on Sara, and the decision on her case may come faster than the ruling on the crimes against humanity case filed against Rodrigo Duterte before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. Sara is up against a pincer movement—the impeachment trial and the grave threats case— that will force her to make missteps along the way.
At this stage, no one will envy Sara. She is no longer the toast of the town, not a cherished guest at Oktoberfest or the main speaker in youth summits sponsored by the Philippine Army (PA.) Surely, schools will not be inveigled to invite her, particularly those who have inked a covenant against corruption and graft and have denounced any ink to the foremost practitioners of ochlocracy, which the Duterte cult really is. Losing before the SC is one thing but losing the impeachment case is another. With more of their bank, tax and financial records being introduced at trial, Sara will not only lose her sense of balance as her case goes to pot and her well-paid lawyers end up asking: Hindi namin alam na ganito pala ito kabigat! That’s what you get for loving Sara, the Absolute Idea.#
