Editorial

Trifles

Pat Quinn was sworn in as Illinois governor shortly after the 59-member state Senate voted unanimously to oust Rod Blagojevich from office.

Blagojevich was charged by authorities, on the strength of taped conversations, with auctioning off the Senate seat vacated by President Barack Obama. It was the governor’s duty to appoint a replacement. Subsequently, other irregular acts of Blagojevich from years back were exposed. He was also accused of binding the state in deals with campaign contributors.

The recorded conversations betrayed the former governor’s arrogance and sense of entitlement to his post. He kept up this stance when he defied calls, even from Obama himself, to resign. The former governor then went on a public relations campaign and then ended up speaking on the last of his four-day trial, rambling about the good he claims to have done for the people of Illinois. He prided himself in doing “real things for real people.”

He was kicked out, anyway. In a similarly unanimous vote, the senators decided he could not hold public office in Illinois ever again. The impeachment proceedings were businesslike and none too dramatic—aside from Blagojevich’s 47-minute plea which had been described as “alternately defiant, humble and sentimental,” there was no grandstanding by the senators who acted as judges.

The swiftness of the process and its decisive ending remind us of our own nation’s fascination with impeachment and how some quarters have trivialized what is supposed to be this sacred, last-resort move to advance their own agenda.

Indeed the constitutional option reserved for the gravest of transgressions has been dragged into the level of petty politics. In the case of the President, impeachment complaints have become an annual affair, nay, fanfare, involving dozens of complainants, hundreds of pages of supporting documents and numerous self-serving press conferences. The idea of dummy petitions has also made a mockery of the intention to prevent the process from becoming a tool for harassment.

Most recently, it was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who was threatened with an impeachment complaint. Quite predictably, the issue fizzled out as fast as it had surfaced.

To this day, no impeachment complaint, not even that against former President Joseph Estrada, has ever completed a cycle resulting in an acquittal or conviction. Hence, the satisfaction of having senator-judges decide an official’s fate based on the trial, as well as the sting of that official’s removal from office after a guilty verdict, remain hypothetical.

Sadly, while impeachment has become a familiar term for most Filipinos, few realize it was not included in the Constitution to be trifled with.