The summary and precipitate dismissal of Rep. Gary Alejano’s impeachment complaint signaled the requiem for due process, judiciousness and fairness and incanted an alleluia to inordinate partisan importuning.
The dismissed complaint verily satisfied the minimum standard of “recital of facts constituting the offense charged and determinative of the jurisdiction of the committee” as required by the House Rules on Impeachment.
No less than Justice Committee Chairman Reynaldo Umali in his opening remarks recited the impeachable offenses charged and the ultimate or very basic facts constituting the subject offenses.
In determining whether the complaint is sufficient in form and substance, the Committee on Justice is limited to the contents of the verification and the averments of the complaint.
Meandering outside the periphery of the complaint is not allowed in the resolving sufficiency of form and substance like what Majority Leader Rodolfo Fariñas did when he prematurely raised the issues on hearsay evidence.
Questions on hearsay are relevant in finding probable cause, which would be a subsequent phase of the proceedings, not during the determination of sufficiency of substance, which, again, is confined to the basic allegations of the complaint.
While the impeachment procedure is a political process, it is not a partisan enterprise.
A political process entails an exposition of values, advocacies and judiciousness, while partisanship is the direct opposite.
Partisanship is blind adherence to the dictates of a party. It is an injudicious allegiance to a commanding figure or a potent group.
Due process must never be sacrificed to imprudent haste and partisan subservience.
At the end of the day, while it is true that impeachment is a veritable numbers game, it would be better if there were a confluence of superiority of numbers and ascendancy of reason and arguments, which was not allowed to happen in yesterday’s proceedings because Alejano was denied a proper hearing as mandated by Section 3(2) of Article XI of the Constitution.
EDCEL C. LAGMAN