The eleventh hour

THE debates are still going on and the end is not yet in sight. Eleven hours after Congress opened its session 4 p.m. on Monday, the House still has not voted on the Justice Committee Report No. 1012 that has dismissed for lack of substance the impeachment complaint filed by lawyer Oliver Lozano and thrown out two other impeachment complaints on the ground that only one case can be initiated against an impeachable official in the span of a year.

It is clear that the minority does not have the 79 votes needed to endorse the impeachment to the Senate. But it is also clear that they are not about to let the impeachment, now in its death throes, expire just yet.

In the two-and-a-half hours since the chair and vice chair of the Justice Committee made their sponsorship speeches for Committee Report 1012 and the Speaker allowed interpellation of the sponsors of the report, Reps. Francis Escudero and Alan Peter Cayetano have taken turns grilling Rep. Luis Villafuerte, one of the vice chairs, on all sorts of esoteric and technical issues related to the report.

Escudero nitpicked on the citations and verification of the Lozano complaint. He circled around the question of when the report was actually completed and how come opposition members of the committee were not provided copies prior to the session. Apparently running out of questions, Escudero began an inquiry into how many times the chair banged the gavel when it dismissed the three complaints. Each dismissal, he insisted, deserved a bang, and threatened to check the video of the committee proceedings to make his point that there were not enough bangs to justify throwing out all complaints.

Cayetano then picked up from where Escudero left off, this time raising questions rich in references to animals (ducks, horses were brought up). Villafuerte gamely took him on, even if he looked worn out. The war of analogies continued before moving on to the battle of which rulebook of procedures the committee had followed (administrative? civil? criminal?).

So far, Cayetano has managed to outlast Escudero, grilling Villafuerte for well over an hour now. He is now going line by line, page by page. Both oppositionists, however, are raising basically the same questions that the minority has been agitated about since last week: the railroading of the impeachment, the tyranny of the numbers, and the disregard for due process. Television reports say that three more congressmen are lined up to interpellate the leaders of the Justice Committee. Given an average of an hour each of questions, they will finish the interpellation by about sunrise.