Diligence

The impeachment trial might have to wait a little longer, it seems.

- ALEX MAGNO

The new Senate president will be chosen on July 28, the morning before the State of the Nation Address (SONA). Both chambers of Congress will choose their respective leaders on this day.

Before a new Senate president is chosen by his colleagues, there will be no presiding officer for the impeachment court.

Some have argued that the Senate President of the 19th Congress, Francis Escudero, could claim holdover powers and proceed with the trial. But that will be sloppy. It will be presumptuous on Escudero's part. He would rather wait until all the formalities covering the chamber's leadership are completed. That is simply how he operates: keen on procedural neatness.

Recall, last February, a majority of congressmen suddenly found the enlightenment to sign a freshly written impeachment complaint against Vice President Sara Duterte. That came like a lightning bolt. They could not have seriously read the complaint, given time limitations—much less take the leisure to contemplate the consequences of such a document.

What was eventually the fourth draft of an impeachment complaint is a rehash of three previous impeachment complaints the House leadership kept frozen in some sort of limbo in the few meters separating the Speaker's desk from the Secretary-General's. By some legal fiction, first three complaints that most legal experts found laughable are deemed not submitted to avoid violating the constitutional injunction against multiple impeachment filings within a one-year period.