A whole lot of work for nothing 

The circus has officially come to town.

On Monday, lawyer Andre De Jesus walked into the Batasan and filed the first impeachment complaint against Ferdinand Marcos Jr., accusing him of everything from graft to drug addiction. Endorsed by Pusong Pinoy Rep. Jett Nisay, the complaint charges the President with betraying the public trust, citing the surrender of Rodrigo Duterte to the ICC and the alleged misuse of unprogrammed funds as the smoking guns.

But in the Batasang Pambansa, facts don’t matter. Numbers do. And Marcos owns the numbers.

To believe this complaint will prosper is to misunderstand the architecture of power in the Philippines. The House of Representatives is not a hall of justice; it is a marketplace of transactions. And in this market, Marcos Jr. holds all the currency. His allies have already dismissed the complaint as “shapeless,” “formless,” and “vague” before the ink was even dry.

They control the numbers, they control the committees, and they control the pork barrel that keeps the “supermajority” compliant.

The filing itself reeks of a desperate, flailing counter-offensive from a cornered Duterte faction. The timing is too convenient, coming just after the government allowed the ICC to finally take custody of the former president.

Worse, the messengers themselves are compromised. The Palace didn’t even need to answer the charges on their merits; they simply attacked the endorser. They pointed out that Rep. Nisay is one of the very “congtractors” implicated by the Independent Commission for Infrastructure in the anomalous flood control projects.

When the person shouting “corruption” is himself accused of ghost projects, the moral high ground collapses instantly. It turns the impeachment into a farce of pot calling the kettle black.

In fact, this charade likely does Marcos more favors than harm. By filing a doomed complaint now, the opposition has effectively vaccinated the President. The Constitution prohibits more than one impeachment proceeding against the same official within a period of one year.

Once this weak, “shapeless” complaint is crushed by the House machinery, Marcos is immune for the next twelve months. He walks away untouchable, with the added bonus of looking like a victim of “politicking”.

This is the tragedy of our current political moment. We are forced to watch two factions of the ruling elite tear each other apart not over ideology, not over the welfare of the people, but over who gets to hold the shovel that digs into the nation’s coffers. The “unprogrammed appropriations” cited in the complaint are real, and the corruption is systemic. But you will not find the solution in a rigged tribunal.

The impeachment is dead on arrival. While the elites bicker over technicalities and immunities, the machinery of terror and plunder grinds on, undisturbed. The real numbers that matter aren’t the votes in the House: they are the masses who know that whether it is a Marcos or a Duterte in power, the water is still rising, and the blood is still flowing.