Academic

Wednesday was a sad day for those who looked forward to the free entertainment provided by yet another traumatic impeachment exercise.

- ALEX MAGNO

The Senate overwhelmingly voted to archive the defective impeachment complaint sent to it by the House.

Many of us sat for nearly six hours, glued to the proceedings, anxious to be clarified. The experience was both satisfying and exasperating.

It was satisfying because the unholy politics underpinning this particular impeachment effort - that only the willfully blind refuse to see - was finally put front and center by senators unwilling to be reduced to pawns in a poorly disguised power play.

Senator Imee Marcos put the issue squarely: naming Speaker Martin Romualdez as the prime mover of this doomed impeachment effort. Senators Francis Escudero and Alan Cayetano brought luminosity to the real dynamics behind this sordid - albeit sloppy - impeachment play.

It was exasperating because, in the last analysis, archiving the case was the only real choice the Senate had, given that the Supreme Court ruled the impeachment case unconstitutional. The ruling was immediately executory. The Senate debate was entirely academic.

Rejecting the Court's ruling, which was the real option pursued by the noisy but increasingly irrelevant minority, meant precipitating a constitutional crisis. That is too high a price to pay to salvage an impeachment complaint that was imperious as it was whimsical.

It will be immensely more fruitful to try and find the 5,500 flood control projects for which P2 trillion was spent and yet remain invisible to the naked eye. If we indeed want accountability, this is where to look for it.