I soooooo dislike this woman sitting as the Ombudsman! This woman has done so much injustice to the Filipino people for simply sitting there and doing nothing and watch corruption go ballistically gargantuan! She is the reason why corrupts continue to prance around and are not being prosecuted! It’s about time to prosecute Merciditas Gutierrez herself!
Impeach Merceditas Gutierrez, and everything will follow.
It’s the first thing to do, but it’s also the hardest thing to do. It’s the hardest thing to do because unlike prosecuting people, which merely entails going to the courts, impeaching Gutierrez requires going to Congress. The difference between the two is the difference between going to Trinoma mall and going to a talipapa.
You go to the courts, you have the luxury of arguing the merits of your case. Your case may not always be listened to, many judges being persuaded to hear only the counsel of Manuel Roxas, Ninoy Aquino and Jose Abad Santos, Josefa Llanes Escoda and Vicente Lim—as they appear on P100, P500 and P1,000 bills, respectively—but you’ve at least got a chance. You can always bring your case not just to another judge but to another court, which is the court of public opinion. Judges tend to be a little sensitive when they are exposed in public as corrupt.
You go to Congress, and you have no such luxury. The merit of a case is to Congress as the information on the caloric content of a can of beer is to a drunk: It is irrelevant. You saw that in the attempt to impeach Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and you saw that in the attempt to impeach Gutierrez herself. The congressmen slapped them dead like mosquitoes as soon as they landed on their laps. The only merit to merit their attention is how many heroes will be there to persuade them to strangle the bid. Or as an afterthought for those who are a little finicky, how many heroes they will have to part with to hire a speechwriter to give a patina of loftiness to the murder. Not that they care if the speechwriter plagiarizes or not. But that’s another story.
Or so it was during Arroyo’s time. Anything put to Congress was nothing more or less than a numbers game, in more ways than one. There was no sanction to congressmen behaving this way. Arguing the merits of the case in the court of public opinion did not help. That Arroyo and Gutierrez were guilty as charged was patent enough, their crimes lit by neon lamps. But condoning those crimes carried with it no punishment, any more than committing the crimes did. The congressmen had nothing to fear about not being elected again. They could always count on Arroyo to make sure they were, by money and machinery, and where that failed, theft of the vote.
Can P-Noy change things? Can he impeach Merceditas Gutierrez?
That depends on two things.
The first is how well Feliciano Belmonte is able to win friends and influence people in Congress without having to resort to the same methods perfected by Jose de V when he was still Arroyo’s chief defender in the House, and Prospero Nograles after De Venecia took offense at the First Couple for horning in on his cozy setup with the Chinese. Which is buying off congressmen with Malacañang money. It remains to a great extent a numbers game, and Belmonte’s talents in building alliances and networks will be taxed to the full. Or his lack of them will be shown up. Easy to kill an impeachment bid, not too easy to ram it through. Whatever Manny Villar has become, he has the distinction of being the first speaker to impeach a president, and the most popular president at that.
The second is how well P-Noy is able to wield People Power. He hasn’t really tapped its potential, which has always been there with the spirit of voluntarism that sprung with his candidacy. He hasn’t revitalized it, reorganized it, or made it a full partner in his government as the direct representative of his boss, the people. He does so now and woe to the congressmen who will block his bid to impeach Gutierrez. Many of them have to run in 2013 and can no longer bank on Arroyo to help them win by hook or by crook. The elections already showed the fury of People Power: It didn’t just make P-Noy president, it shoved everyone who had been there at Arroyo’s side into a hole. It’s People Power that can guarantee those who insist on screwing the people will join them.You get Gutierrez’s impeachment past the House to the Senate, look at the wonders it will unfold. At the very least, it will pave the way for the work of the Truth Commission. Gutierrez’s trial will also be Arroyo’s trial. An investigation into the monstrosities the Ombudsman failed to undo will also be an investigation into the monstrosities the Usurper dared to do. The prosecution of Arroyo, which is the first order of business if P-Noy is serious about ending corruption—in a far bigger way than has to do with stealing money, in a way that has to do with the utter rottenness of despotic rule—follows as naturally as day follows night.
Which is the reason Arroyo will fight tooth-and-nail in Congress to stop it. Which is the reason P-Noy will need People Power in all its fury to ram it through.
At the very most, you try Gutierrez in the Senate, you give the country an education in democracy, enough to make sure another Arroyo, or Marcos, will never happen again. Gutierrez’s impeachment trial will be Arroyo’s impeachment trial that never was. It will be far more riveting than the Erap impeachment trial, which supplanted “Marimar” and the PBA as TV’s all-time biggest blockbuster, which gave the public to glimpse what democracy truly was, or could be. The only reason the lessons of that trial did not get to take root far more deeply than they should was that Arroyo made sure from Day One her countrymen would unlearn them, having little to do with imparting them to begin with. The reason the lessons of Gutierrez’s trial, which is really Arroyo’s proxy trial, will penetrate the deepest recesses of the Filipino mind is that P-Noy will be there from Day One to make it so, being the inheritor of People Power, being determined not to fritter away his inheritance.
Begin the Beguine.
Impeach her.
By Conrado de Quiros
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