pat

these lyrics are so important

i feel sick in my stomach

We are officially entering the endgame of the Sara Duterte impeachment trial, and the political landscape is shifting fast. With the trial rapidly accelerating, Senator-judge Erwin Tulfo did exactly what political commentators and legal scholars have been whispering about for months. He stood up and challenged the absurd math behind the final voting threshold. Tulfo is asking the only question that matters: Why should the baseline for a 2/3 conviction stay at a rigid 24 when a massive chunk of the Senate is physically incapable of voting? Do they count as members of the Senate if they can't vote? Look at the Senate roster right now. Four senators are completely out of commission and won't be counted for the vote: - Sen. Loren Legarda is out on extended medical leave abroad (which keeps on being extended because she must love French medicine soooo much and absolutely isn't hiding from plunder charges against her, no no. 🤡). - Sen. Dela Rosa is literally in hiding from an active ICC arrest warrant for crimes against humanity. 🐷 - Sen. Estrada and Rodante Marcoleta are both currently sitting in jail facing plunder charges. 👮 If they can't be counted for a vote then how can they be counted as part of the denominator for the vote? Holding the baseline at 24 means you need a hard 16 votes to convict. But if 4 senators are gone, you only have 20 senator-judges left in the room. If 15 of them vote to convict, that is an overwhelming 75 percent majority of active judges. Yet, under the old rules, Duterte would walk free simply because the math is being padded by fugitives, detainees, and sick leave. That isn't a constitutional guardrail. It is an institutional escape hatch for the Dutertes. What if a bomb goes off in the Senate that kills a few senators or people get sick during the day of the vote? Are we still stuck at 16 votes? Sen. Escudero didn't just brush this off but punted the issue to September 16, when retired Supreme Court justices and legal experts will come in as amici curiae, followed by a final Senate vote on the math question on September 23. They are expected to support lowering the threshold. Sen. Erwin Tulfo cited the landmark 1949 Supreme Court case Avelino v. Cuenco to support his push to lower the voting baseline. In that historic ruling, the Supreme Court famously held that an absolute majority of "all the members of the Senate" could be computed based on the number of senators within the coercive jurisdiction of the body, meaning those who are actually available, present, and capable of participating, rather than the total constitutional seats. Tulfo and others argue that senators who are completely outside the Senate's operational reach (such as fugitives or those in detention) should be excluded from the denominator when calculating the crucial two-thirds threshold for conviction or acquittal. I hear from political circles here that the administration is confident the Supreme Court will side with this interpretation and the prosecution is confident they have the numbers to convict even if the number stays fixed at 16. This explains why the prosecution is sprinting through the finish line with this impeachment trial. They dropped their remaining witnesses under Article I of the Articles of Impeachment (misuse, misappropriation, and irregular liquidation of P12.5 million in confidential funds by Duterte). They know they’ve already buried the defense under a mountain of damning PSA evidence. When you’ve already proven the OVP was paying out intelligence funds to dead infants from 1965, you don't really need a closing act. Video Source: ABS-CBN News Channel youtube.com/watch?v=IW4dPjta…