Swift dismissal of Marcos ouster raps unlikely as lawmakers take caution

By Kenneth Christiane L. Basilio, Reporter

THE House Justice Committee is unlikely to immediately dismiss impeachment complaints against President Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr. when it begins evaluating their merits on Monday, political analysts said over the weekend.

Lawmakers are expected to take a deliberative approach that could draw out the impeachment process against Mr. Marcos, allowing momentum for his ouster to fade rather than risk political backlash from an outright dismissal, they added.

“The likely outcome is neither drama nor vindication nor a genuine reckoning,” Ederson DT. Tapia, a political science professor at the University of Makati, said in a Facebook Messenger chat. “It is managed quiet.”

“A slow, technical process dissipates attention,” he added. “Enough procedure to claim due process, enough delay to drain attention, and enough legality to justify dismissal, without ever allowing the issue to become a sustained national conversation.”

The 39-member House panel will begin meeting on Monday, Feb. 2, to assess the merits of two impeachment complaints against Mr. Marcos, a process that could set the stage for a full-blown inquiry which could fuel further discontent against the 68-year-old leader who is facing growing criticism over a multibillion-peso graft scandal.

Batangas Rep. Gerville R. Luistro, who heads the Justice committee, had said they would consolidate the complaints and examine whether they meet both “form and substance” requirements under House rules.

“The consolidation stage is especially important because it allows the majority to frame the matter as technical rather than substantive,” Mr. Tapia said. Marcos allies dominate Congress, including his son who leads the majority bloc in the lower chamber. The House speaker, a party ally of the President, has already rejected the accusations against Mr. Marcos.

Several officials, politicians and private contractors have been accused of being involved in a large-scale corruption scheme that siphoned up to hundreds of billions of pesos from dikes and floodwalls, infrastructures considered vital in a country that faces months of heavy monsoon rains.

In July, Mr. Marcos said his government had uncovered corruption in the projects and pledged to root out wrongdoers, but slow progress and subsequent implication of Cabinet members and political leaders have stirred public resentment against his administration.

The ouster bids are now making the case that the chief executive had benefited from shady government contracts tied to flood control works and allowed corruption to fester through a budget allocation formula for congressional districts. Both accuse Mr. Marcos of graft, constitutional violations and betrayal of public trust — three of the five grounds for impeachment under the 1987 Constitution, alongside bribery and other high crimes.

“In a House overwhelmingly dominated by allies of Marcos, impeachment is approached less as a search for truth and more as a problem of political containment,” Mr. Tapia said.

There is a real possibility that lawmakers could toss the ouster bids against Mr. Marcos, said Ephraim B. Cortez, president of the National Union of People’s Lawyers, though he saw no basis for doing so.

The first complaint cites Mr. Marcos received alleged benefits from the graft scandal, bypassed domestic legal processes by sending former President Rodrigo R. Duterte to The Hague, while also making claims that a panel formed to investigate massive corruption shielded his political allies.

“As far as the first impeachment complaint is concerned, it should be dismissed because it does not pass the sufficient in substance test,” Michael Henry Ll. Yusingco, a senior research fellow at the Ateneo de Manila University Policy Center, said in a Facebook chat. “It is based mainly on opinion and speculation because the allegations are not supported by strong evidence.”

A second impeachment complaint followed just a week after the first filing, amid speculations that the initial case was deliberately weak and was intended only to trigger the one-year bar on proceedings against the same official.

Activists sought to strengthen their complaint with the testimony of a former Public Works department official who alleged Mr. Marcos received P8 billion in kickbacks from anomalous infrastructure deals, and by citing a so‑called “parametric formula” that allocated funds among congressional districts.

Arjan P. Aguirre, an assistant political science professor at the Ateneo de Manila University, said lawmakers are likely to scrutinize the second complaint more closely because it carried broader accusations than the first.

“By contrast, the other complaint, which centers primarily on Duterte’s arrest, is likely to face greater difficulty in establishing sufficiency in substance, notwithstanding compliance with formal requirements,” he said in a Facebook chat.

He added that an immediate dismissal of the impeachment bids against Mr. Marcos could further undermine his administration and erode public support, with lawmakers risking being seen as evading their constitutional mandate to favor the President.

“Even if the expected consolidation of the two impeachment complaints against Marcos would improve the factual substance of the allegations, it would still have a very slim chance of success without the support of the majority of the members of the House,” Dennis C. Coronacion, who heads the Political Science department of the University of Santo Tomas, said in a Facebook chat.

The House Justice Committee has 60 session days to complete hearings and must forward its findings to the plenary which will vote on whether to dismiss the case or transmit it to the Senate, acting as the impeachment court that would decide whether Mr. Marcos should be removed from office over corruption allegations.