Finally, Joker Chimes In

In an Inq7 report on the impeachment complaint, Sen. Joker Arroyo echoes my sentiments about the President’s pre-emptive filing of an answer to the impeachment complaint.  He says:

Malacañang’s preemptive move of prematurely filing, without being asked to, an answer to the sham impeachment complaint betrays that the President is getting bum advice to short-circuit, on the flimsiest of technicalities, the process of impeachment. This trivializes the sacrosanct process of impeachment, which will unleash a public backlash, as it happened in 2001.

In the past twenty or so years that I’ve known of him, he has always held ideals equivalent to my own.  He’s not known to take advantage of public opinion or be a slave to populist ideas.  I could always rely on him to articulate morally upright and legally sound views on any topic or current issue. He has managed to hold his course on his own terms and for that, I have always had the highest respect for him. 

For me and I think many others, his silence on the GloriaGate scandal has been deafening.  And when he broke it,  he did not comment on the tapes or on the President’s behavior, he instead attacked the opposition, as if he were one of the President’s lackeys. 

What happened to the Joker Arroyo who would have stood up for all of us in the halls of the Senate? 

To be fair, he wants to be viewed as an impartial judge if and when the tapes and the impeachment complaint reaches him as a member of an impeachment court.  To express an opinion now might prejudce his position later.

Well, if an impeachment trial is forthcoming I hope Joker maintains his usual independence and I’m counting on him to be a moral force in the Senate.  The country is in crisis.  We need men like him to stand up, take a stand, and help us weather this storm.  If he can’t do that, I’m afraid of what that means to Philippine democracy.