Impeachment vs impeachment

There's no constitutional prohibition on impeaching top officials simultaneously.

- ANA MARIE PAMINTUAN

And it’s not the first time that attempts to impeach both the president and the vice president have been initiated during the same Congress.

We saw it during the scandal-plagued presidency of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, when separate impeachment complaints were filed against her and then vice president Noli de Castro.

Yet GMA lasted nine years, becoming the second-longest-serving president after dictator Ferdinand Marcos — despite the “Hello, Garci” controversy and the long string of corruption scandals that erupted during her watch, implicating her and her husband.

It became routine for a weak impeachment complaint to be filed against GMA at the start of every regular session of Congress. Her allies in the House of Representatives acted quickly on each complaint, dismissed it forthwith, and she was effectively inoculated for a year from further impeachment attempts.

Critics suspect that the Marcos administration has borrowed a page from GMA’s book in the filing of the first impeachment complaint against BBM last week.

More complaints are expected to be filed today against BBM. But we know that impeachment is a political process and a numbers game.

The overwhelming House majority at the start of the Marcos administration has been thinned out by the ongoing corruption probe. But so far, the administration retains a super majority in the House under the Solid North’s Bodjie Dy.

You can see this in the way the House handled the first impeachment complaint — deemed to be weak - against BBM, which was endorsed and then transmitted forthwith to the Office of the Speaker.