Bloodied, unbowed, and on camera

It is fascinating how “impeach,” an almost archaic word, has become part of our everyday vocabulary. Quite often, we use it to mean removal from office, as in: “Former Chief Justice Renato Corona was impeached.” At other times, it simply means to formally accuse a high official, as in: “This is the second time Vice President Sara Duterte has been impeached.” One is the effect, the other the process. Both senses are correct.

This double meaning, according to the Dictionary of Word Origins, arose from a confusion of two Latin words. The original root, “impedicare,” literally to tie the feet together, survives in the English word “impede.” A later meaning crept in through an erroneous association with the Latin “impetere,” to accuse or charge, also the root of “impetuous.”

This etymology is significant, because it sits at the very core of the political-legal process now unfolding before us. The nation’s second-highest official stands trial before a court of senator-judges who will decide whether her actions in office leave her fit to remain—or warrant her removal and permanent disqualification from ever holding public office.

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Vice President Sara Duterte is not merely being charged with an ordinary offense punishable by law. She is being tried to determine whether her conduct in office warrants dismissal and perpetual disqualification, the highest penalty that can be imposed on an erring holder of high public office.

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That this trial unfolds against the backdrop of Duterte’s declared intent to run for president in 2028 cannot be ignored. It is the broader canvas on which the whole proceeding is being played. Her supporters read it as impedicare in its most literal sense, an attempt to tie her feet before the race even begins, foreclosing her path to Malacañang by adjudication rather than by the ballot.

Her detractors, on the other hand, insist this is primarily about accountability, about a vice president who has, in various ways, allegedly violated her oath of office. But yes, admittedly, it is also a way of testing whether her conduct disqualifies her from ever seeking another office at all.

In modern democracies, the legal and the political are usually kept apart. But impeachment, as a process sui generis, is a structural coupling of the two, with the Constitution as the ultimate guide to what is permissible. This interplay shows itself at almost every turn. Whether the Senate president should step aside for another presiding officer is a political question. What counts as admissible evidence is a question of legal validity. Two codes, one process.

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That those entrusted to adjudicate are politicians rather than appointed judges is a constant reminder of the process’ political nature. That they must still arrive at a verdict only after weighing evidence, rather than by simple political calculation, is at the same time a reminder of the legal norms that bind them.

But as if this were not complicated enough, a third code is at work in this trial, one we are not always aware of. This is the mass media, which operates by its own selection criteria entirely. Instead of asking what counts as evidence, as law does, or who holds power, as politics does, the mass media asks what counts as information worth reporting. And, in this regard, it shows a marked preference for novelty, drama, conflict, and moral judgment. “Bloodied but unbowed” is not a legal argument, nor does it score a political point. But it is an artifact of pure drama, and it keeps an audience waiting for what comes next.

The sociologist Niklas Luhmann once made the astute observation: “Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media.” If there is any kernel of truth in that statement at all, then neither the prosecution, nor the defense, nor the senator-judges hearing this case can fully control its outcome. The real audience is the public out there. What they see and hear from the live streamed proceedings is constructed and interpreted for them by the mass media before they even realize what’s happening.

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And, as we saw for ourselves in 2001, after the impeachment trial of former President Joseph Estrada was abruptly aborted, how the public reacts to that mediated experience is something no one, on either side, can control.

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