[Newspoint] Stopping Sara

There’s a consuming fear that a Sara Duterte presidency is the worst thing that can happen to this country and that the chances of preventing it don’t look all that good.

As it is, Duterte is already, as we would say, merely “a heartbeat away” — that is, as vice president, first in the line of succession in case the president became incapacitated, although for the moment that prospect is too remote to merit consideration. What gives the chills is that she can become, just three and a half years from now, the next president by a normal vote and begin lording it over us for six long years.

Her incumbency is actually the least of anyone’s worries, especially since President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who has his own dynastic lineage to perpetuate in power — a sister is in the Senate, a cousin the Speaker, and a son in the Lower House — has dropped the Dutertes from the ruling coalition, ending whatever deal the two dynasties may have had. Here are facts from which may be deduced the nature of that deal and who profited and who lost from it: Marcos and Duterte successfully ran in tandem in 2022, and she now says she could have passed up the deal and beaten him to the presidency. 

To be sure, she has her own intrinsic strengths. She rose to vice president, as her own father had risen to president, from mayor of their native Davao City. Philippine elections being about guns, goons, and gold where they really matter, the Dutertes appear competitive, if not at some advantage. That’s judging not only by their potential but more so by their readiness to deploy their resources aggressively, which has just been affirmed by self-admission or evidence or eyewitness testimony at recent congressional hearings.

At one Senate hearing, the Duterte patriarch, Rodrigo, did acknowledge keeping a death squad, which tends to explain the tens of thousands of extrajudicial kills in the war on drugs he pursued during his presidency (2016-2022), the primary object of the hearings. The war itself has been described by self-confessed assassins as a ruse intended to conceal the family’s own drug-smuggling enterprise and at the same time as a strategy for eliminating the competition.

Betraying the same gangland traits as his father’s, Sara announced she had engaged someone to kill the President and his wife and his cousin the Speaker, the hits to be carried out upon her death, foretelling it as occurring at their hands. She made the threat at the height of a Lower House inquiry into huge, unexplained payments from her P612-million confidential fund, unheard of both for its size and as an entitlement. She refused to attend the hearings, and sent assistants who handled the money for her, only for them to end up digging an even deeper hole for both themselves and their boss: the payments were receipted fraudulently.  

The congressional hearings having been publicized nationwide, in some cases as they happened and in their entirety, it may be assumed that the Duterte dynasty has been decisively discredited. Sure enough, a survey taken last month, after the hearings had had a fair run, showed Sara’s trust numbers dipping and Speaker Martin Romualdez’s rising and surpassing hers, a significant reversal. She has always suspected it’s him the Marcoses will field against her in the 2028 presidential fight. Current moves to impeach her, therefore, look well-timed for the cousins. 

But impeachment is a totally different ball game. While it seems a foregone conclusion that the Lower House will get the required third of its members to sign up for impeachment, it’s another matter to get the Senate, where a number of Duterte diehards and holdover allies sit, to come up with the two-thirds that will find her guilty and consequently make her ineligible to run for president or, for that matter, any public office. No wonder Sara has been sounding somewhat hopeful lately; presumably, she is expecting that a Senate trial will make up for what electoral stock she has lost in the all-too-businesslike treatment she got from the Lower House, and that she will be acquitted. 

I can see her going to town with an acquittal. I can see her parading with her herded hordes bearing placards and streamers proclaiming “Not guilty!” I can see her returning with a vengeance on a verdict that, promoted with guns, goons, and gold, may just prove a passable sell to the types whose numbers were enough to put her father in the presidency and her just a heartbeat away.

Doubtless, the Senate is the key battleground. What sort and amount of righteous pressure, then, is needed to be brought to bear on the senators to make them reject whatever inducements may be dangled in front of them by the opposite side? Indeed, what will it take to prevent the worst thing happening to this country? – Rappler.com