You cannot be judge and defense counsel

Your Honor, we need to remind you that you cannot have your cake and eat it too. To paraphrase a Quezonian adage, your loyalty to the vice president should end where your fidelity to the duties of a senator judge begins.

- Atty. Josephus B. Jimenez

With utmost respect to the good and honorable senator from Davao, as a lowly but deeply concerned citizen, and as a taxpayer, I feel it’s both my right and duty to call out a blatant travesty of legal procedures before the impeachment court, even if they call it a "sui generis".

For the first time in all history, as well as totally unprecedented in all the annals of all courts, a judge has jumped the gun on all parties by filing a motion to dismiss. To say that it was irregular is a great understatement. It was a shameless travesty of all forms of propriety and it dishonored the chamber that refused to ignore or even dismiss it outright.

It was entirely perplexing, absolutely annoying, and palpably offensive to the sense of justice and fairness of every decent Filipino. As components of the sovereign Filipino people who ordained and promulgated the 1987 Philippine Constitution, we should all be outraged at such a highly irregular abuse of power. The honorable senator, who belongs to the Duterte bloc, in the Senate should have exercised a little sense of dignity and decency. He should have restrained himself and allowed the lawyers in the Senate to guide him.