It bears repeating that impeachment was created by the Americans, borrowing and adapting from British traditions, in Madison’s words, as an “inquest into the conduct of public men,” an instrument of last resort when a republic is confronted by its highest officials becoming tyrannical or scofflaws. Up to that time, the only alternative to an abusive magistrate was, as Benjamin Franklin bluntly put it, assassination. To that end, impeachment was strictly meant to resolve a political question: whether there still existed fitness for office. In other words, whether an official still enjoyed public trust. To that end, only moral certainty, and not proof beyond reasonable doubt, was required to render a guilty verdict; the Senate acted as a jury of peers of the impeached official.

As for criminal penalties, if any, they only become possible at the end of a purely judicial trial. This is because public opinion and politics have no relevance when life, liberty, or property can be lost, but they have a necessary role to play when fitness for public office is concerned.

The framers of our Constitution, frustrated by the interminable rule of Ferdinand Marcos Sr., decided impeachment shouldn’t be an instrument of last resort, an extraordinary “break glass in case of emergency” measure. Rather, impeachment should almost become routine, because it would serve as a perpetual threat against unworthy officials. Perhaps they felt this institutionalized turmoil was the better alternative to rallying in the streets at the drop of a hat. But there is a fundamental difference between these two approaches. The traditional approach made impeachment very difficult because only a truly calamitous situation would be able to muster the supermajorities required to overturn a national electoral mandate. The 1987 approach made it easy to impeach, but fairly difficult to convict; it wouldn’t be easy but not difficult enough.

Needless to say, officials facing the practical realities of this constitutional tinkering responded creatively.

The very first post-1987 impeachment was classic in its motivation: the country was being ruled—actually, not ruled, that was the problem—by a homegrown Nero. Impeachment had remained such a theoretical procedure that during former President Joseph Estrada’s impeachment trial, he was given a full-court defense, literally. A former chief justice and a former solicitor-general led his defense but forgot they were being judged before two tribunals, the Senate and the public. The result was precisely what impeachment was meant to forestall: a revolt in the streets.

It should have marked the end of the Fifth Republic; instead, the Church, Army, civil society, Congress, and the courts combined to start mutating the republic into a regime opposite to what its founders intended, where one by one, and systematically, every innovation meant to foster popular participation and accountability was either neutralized or turned into a means to prevent the very things intended. If Estelito Mendoza demonstrably proved his legal genius only worked out of the public eye and only in the dark, moist recesses of the legal system, his spirit imbued what followed.

If impeachment were an easy procedure, so too would be its antidote: the promiscuous filing of cases by allies—”self-impeachment”—to inoculate the incumbent from real threats. If impeachment dared menace the Supreme Court or its members to account, the court could provoke a constitutional crisis which, coming on the heels of the upheaval of Edsa Dos and Tres, no one wanted: so then Speaker Jose de Venecia folded rather than impeach Hilario Davide, and when Chief Justice Renato Corona was, indeed, impeached, the Supreme Court would leave no good deed unpaid and give its blessing to an Estelito-style creative use of past precedent, the quo warranto. Essentially a means to convict without needing to impeach. Was it an eye for an eye? We have gone very far away indeed from the era of the first magistrates of the land: the Supreme Court, after all, literally portrays the Ten Commandments on its official seal; the kind of sectarian creed that says it all: Old Testament in its brutality.

Putting its own egotism ahead of discernment, because its membership is increasingly at variance with traditional expectations of seriousness and competence among its members, the Senate has been easily intimidated by the Supreme Court; here, Senators Sherwin Gatchalian, Francis “Chiz” Escudero, and Robinhood Padilla are all aspects of the same combination of shortcomings: Gatchalian lacked the nerve to preside, and thus failed to lead; Escudero lacked the imagination to be more than the mere legal equivalent of a bean counter, and so neither has a judge’s wisdom nor a juryman’s common sense, much less dignified independence; Padilla can play, as every senator does, to the gallery, with the difference that since he glories in his ignorance and is heedless of the need to uphold either the institution of the Senate or the republic, he is worse than a bad actor; he is a boring clown.

The defense’s mistake was essentially the same as Estrada’s and Corona’s: it was smug. It never realized that perhaps the only group of people despised by our society more than politicians are lawyers, and if the veil of legalese is lifted, then the public knows an official who’s betrayed public trust when they see it. It’s the Watergate principle: follow the money.