After junking Arroyo impeach bid, lawmakers focus on economic issues

By Gerry Baldo and Charlie V. Manalo

12/04/2008

Speaker Prospero Nograles yesterday sought to dissuade opposition lawmakers from bringing their plaint against President Arroyo to the streets, urging them to instead focus on helping shield the economy from ill effects of the US recession.

It’s time for the country to move on, Nograles stressed after the House of Representatives, with an overwhelming vote of 183-21, junked the impeachment complaint against Mrs. Arroyo in a marathon session that started Tuesday and ended at 1 a.m. of the following day.

But even as Nograles sounded the alarm for legislative action in the economic front, the opposition lawmakers seemed not to budge a bit.

Rep. Lorenzo Tañada charged Mrs. Arroyo’s allies in the House with abusing their discretion when they “overstepped” their duty and acted as “an impeachment court.”

Tañada said that after having participated in three previous impeachment proceedings, he was convinced that “no sitting president, present or future, will ever be impeached by the House of Representatives through proceedings in the committee on justice.”

“As a matter of fact, I do not even see any future impeachment complaint hurdling the obstacle of “sufficiency in substance,” he added.

But Nograles disagreed with Tañada as he stressed that the

House pursued a swift but transparent and judicious process of impeachment. As a matter of fact, he said, the House decision to junk the impeachment complaint was “a result of the proponents’ failure to prove that their complaint was sufficient in substance.”

“We allowed all sides to speak their minds but, at the end of the day, the proponents failed to get the support that they needed to bring this complaint to the Senate which would conduct the impeachment trial,”Nograles said.

Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita, in a chance interview during at the Senate, admitted that Malacañang expected the defeat of the impeachment complaint against Mrs. Arroyo.

“As far as Malacañang is concerned, it’s (the junking of the impeachment complaint) a welcome development. We happen to know that the allies of the administration have the numbers in the lower House; therefore, if they are giving up our alliance, believing that indeed the position they are taking is the right way, then we were expecting that. That’s the very essence of having political alliance with the President,” Ermita boasted.

Rep. Luis Villafuerte (Kampi, Camarines Sur), meantime, blamed former Speaker Jose de Venecia (Lakas-Pangasinan) for the dismal fate of the impeachment complaint.

He said De Venecia endorsed an impeachment complaint filed by his son Joey against President Arroyo the contents was similar to a previous complaint that he (de Venecia) dismissed in 2006.

Rep. Eleandro Jesus Madrona (Lakas-Romblon), meantime, urged de Venecia to resign from the Lakas-Christian Muslim Democrats after endorsing the impeachment complaint against Mrs. Arroyo.

For Madrona, the voting at the plenary hall dismissing the complaint for lack of substance reflected the fact that de Venecia himself had lost the trust of his party colleagues.

Rep. Matias Defensor (Lakas, QC) said it would be difficult for Lakas members to expel De Venecia from the party which the former Speaker helped found together with former President Fidel Ramos.

Nograles, meantime, urged the supporters of the Arroyo-impeachment complaint to just “respect and accept the final verdict of the House of Representatives.”

“We followed the same constitutional provisions and the same House rules on impeachment. We just have to respect the rule of law and then move on,” Nograles said.

The impeachment complaint was the fourth of the cases filed against President Arroyo in as many years. As in the latest complaint, all the previous complaints were dismissed on the basis that they lacked substance.

Members of both the majority coalition and minority have a constitutional mandate to serve the interest of the people.

“We may differ in positions and political advocacies, but we have the same vision of serving national interest. Emotions, more often than not, boiled during public debates but, in the end, reason and civility prevailed,” Nograles noted.

Nograles said the lawmakers ought to focus now on economic issues in order to help the local economy adapt to, or mitigate the ill effects of, the current economic meltdown now engulfing the Western economies. Reports filed by Gerry Baldo, Angie Rosales, Charlie Manalo

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