Column: The other China virus: GANID-16

Published on March 10, 2020.

On Tuesday last week, the President’s official spokesperson speculated that President Duterte would temporarily shut down Philippine offshore gaming operators (Pogos) after Senate hearings unearthed startling evidence of operators engaged in corruption, money laundering, and sex trafficking.

Secretary Salvador Panelo offered an argument from analogy. “The President, if you remember, suspended operations of lotteries when he received certain complaints of anomalies. If the complaints are really serious, the President will do something about them.” This was yet another of his glittering generalizations—explanations which do not in fact explain.

Column: Of course Panelo endorsed it

Published on September 10, 2019.

In “referring” ex-mayor Antonio Sanchez’s application for executive clemency to the Board of Pardons and Parole, Secretary Salvador Panelo, the presidential spokesperson and chief presidential legal counsel, did not use the words “recommend” or “endorse.” But understood from the perspectives of both ordinary language and cultural practice, his Feb. 26, 2019 letter to executive director Reynaldo Bayang can be justifiably described as a recommendation or an endorsement. And the many-layered context in which the referral was made proves that the intervention, far from being the merely ministerial task Panelo now says it was, was a problematic exercise of public authority, and was meant to help secure Sanchez’s release.

Of course it was a recommendation, an endorsement.

Column: Should the media cover Panelo?

Published on August 20, 2019.

He is the presidential spokesperson, even as he remains chief presidential legal counsel. But Secretary Salvador Panelo’s stock in trade, as principal explainer of the Duterte presidency, consists of three negative practices.

Column: The case for impeaching Duterte

Published on July 2, 2019.

The legal case for impeaching President Duterte is based on substantial grounds. His latest remarks about Philippine helplessness in the face of Chinese predation in our exclusive economic zone proves, yet again, that his administration’s “soft landing” policy vis-a-vis China began a deliberate and continuing effort to bend the Constitution to China’s will.

But the political case for impeaching the President is the one the administration thinks it can readily win. Presidential spokesperson Salvador Panelo once again spoke the quiet part out loud, when he described impeachment as merely a “numbers game.”

It is in fact a numbers game, in the important sense that impeachment is a political process too, undertaken by one of the two political branches of government. But it is not a political undertaking alone. The Constitution provides specific grounds for impeachment: “culpable violation of the Constitution, treason, bribery, graft and corruption, other high crimes, or betrayal of public trust.” All of these grounds require the House of Representatives, in considering impeachment, and especially the Senate, in considering conviction, to exercise a kind of judicial determination.

Column: Locsin and other small men

Column No. 550 was published on June 18, 2019. 

When 22 Filipino fishermen almost died at sea after a Chinese vessel rammed their boat inside the West Philippine Sea on June 9, the initial reaction of the strutting, slur-happy, jetski-riding officials of the pugnacious Duterte administration was either to (a) doubt the fishermen or (b) do nothing.

This was a big scandal—the first time that China has sunk a Filipino fishing boat since the maritime disputes in the Spratlys began, the most violent act since China refused to honor a three-party agreement in 2012 to withdraw vessels from Panatag, or Scarborough Shoal, certainly the largest Chinese provocation since the arbitral tribunal ruled in favor of the Philippines in 2016. And what did the officials who like to talk tough and dirty, to talk a big game, do? They acted small.

Column: Is this the second Marcos administration?

Published on March 5, 2019.

In “Duterte’s three changes are here,” I proposed that the Duterte administration was “fundamentally different from other post-Marcos administrations” on account of three “deeply unsettling” policies. A killing spree which threatens to turn a nation of martyrs into a country of killers; a disorienting pivot to China which degrades Philippine sovereignty and risks national territory—and the rehabilitation of the Marcos family.

I wrote that in November 2016, mere hours before the Supreme Court allowed the burial of the remains of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Libingan ng mga Bayani. Since then, the rehabilitation of the Marcoses under the Duterte administration has only grown in boldness, and in disregard for the bloodstained facts of history.

Column: Government by the obscene

This column was published on October 31, 2017. Remember the insane sexual banter Martin Andanar and Salvador Panelo thought made them look Duterte-like? “All they have really done is focus attention on the obscenities that have become characteristic of this administration. This is not a distraction from anything; rather, it is a concentration of perception.”

The recent scandalous public utterances of Secretary Martin Andanar and Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo may have been scripted, designed to help deflect public attention from hidden wealth and drug smuggling allegations haunting President Duterte and his family, or they may have been launched, like other controversies, in an attempt to distract the public from its growing anxiety over extrajudicial killings. It doesn’t matter. We see through the statements and have not forgotten that only the poor caretaker of the warehouse where shabu linked to influential people in Davao was stored is in detention; we continue to monitor the President’s responses to the controversy over his bank accounts, and remember (at least I do) that when he visited the Inquirer in August 2015 he told us that he had “only P4 million” in the bank.

But the obscenities Andanar and Panelo used, whether deliberate or inadvertent, also reflect one aspect of the Duterte presidency which has begun to lose its sinister sheen: the use of foul language as format and substitute for policy. Some people still laugh, or titter, when the President fails in public appearances to “limit [his] mouth,” to use his own euphemism; I would think that part of this audience response can be attributed to nervous laughter, and part to a genuine appreciation of his colorful language. But I am not the only one to sense a general fatigue over his outrageous remarks. I’m sure part of this is resignation to the new normal, but if I’m not mistaken many people have learned to tune out the President’s bombardment of F-words, insults and rape jokes, to choose not to bear witness to his linguistic airstrikes. Like any entertainer whose performance is based on shock appeal, even a charismatic but tediously repetitive President will lose his audience.

All this makes the two secretaries’ scandalous statements not only sleazy but also lame.

A series of unfortunate appointments

Without meaning to, I started an occasional series of columns on unfortunate appointments to key government positions. It was prompted by Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay’s kowtowing (a word with Chinese roots!)  to an aggressive China; I patterned the use of the word “unfortunate” after Patricia Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” (Irony, though, sometimes refuses to travel.)

“The unfortunate Mr. Yasay” was published on July 12, 2016, the same day the arbitral tribunal awarded the Philippines a near-complete victory in its case against China. “No one wants to go to war,” I wrote. “[T]hat’s what diplomacy and international law are for, to assert our rights and our claims without recourse to violence. It is unfortunate that, even before he starts, Yasay has surrender on his mind.”

On August 23, 2016, I followed up (that is, it became a series in my mind) with a column on “The unfortunate Salvador Panelo,” then, as now, the chief presidential legal counsel. Many things are unfortunate about Sal Panelo, but I focused on the quality of his lawyering. “He argues like an ambulance chaser …. The great principles that animate the higher practice of the law, not merely to resolve disputes but to discover truth and dispense justice, are inconveniences that must be rationalized away.” Also: “Panelo has … argued, in more than one instance, that basic principles of law do not mean what generations of lawyers have been taught they meant.”

Both Panelo and Yasay (since rejected by the Commission on Appointments because of his American citizenship) were appointed by President Rodrigo Duterte. The third column was on an appointee of President Gloria Arroyo’s—Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Diosdado Peralta. His decision rationalizing the burial of the remains of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng Mga Bayani provoked great outrage. On November 15, 2016, in “The unfortunate Justice Peralta,” I wrote: “There is none so blind as he who refuses to see. Associate Justice Diosdado Peralta’s ponencia in the Marcos burial cases will go down in history as the cowardly rationalizations of a willfully blind man; he deserves the opprobrium coming his way. He still has six years to serve in the Supreme Court, but his legacy will be forever defined by this badly written, ill-thought-through, deliberately obtuse majority decision.”

The fourth column in the series went back to a Duterte appointee: the solicitor general who told the public, and by extension the Court of Appeals, that he was effectively a member of the Supreme Court. In “The unfortunate Calida, ’16th Justice’,” published on February 21, 2017, I wrote: “it is both unethical and illogical for a solicitor general to assert that he is ‘considered’ as another Supreme Court justice, because in fact he isn’t and because the separation of powers requires that he shouldn’t be.” I concluded: “Calida’s invocation of his supposed stature as the 16th Justice was plainly meant to put pressure on the Court of Appeals.”

The subject of the next column in the series is probably Duterte’s most famous, and possibly most consequential, appointment: In “The unfortunate Bato dela Rosa,” published on May 2, 2017, I gave three reasons (reasons shared, of all people, by Speaker Bebot Alvarez) why “No chief of the Philippine National Police has brought as much disgrace and discredit to the institution he heads as Ronald ‘Bato’ dela Rosa, a likeable enough police officer promoted beyond his capacity and competence.”

Who should I write on next?

Column: The unfortunate Salvador Panelo

Published on August 23, 2016.

IN 1992, Salvador Panelo ran for the Senate. That year, there were 12 six-year terms and 12 three-year terms at stake. Panelo, now the chief presidential legal counsel, ran as one of the 24 candidates of the Marcos political party, the Kilusang Bagong Lipunan or KBL.

Out of 163 qualified candidates, Panelo came in 125th. Tito Sotto topped the Senate race, with 11.7 million votes. The last of the 24 winning senators was reelectionist Butz Aquino; he earned 3.9 million votes. Panelo had 289,000 votes, less than 8 percent of Aquino’s. Of the 24 KBL candidates, he ranked 13th. The loyalist lawyer Oliver Lozano, who came into prominence after the Marcoses fled Malacañang, earned 407,000 votes.

(Fun fact: In 1992, Gloria Arroyo came in 13th; that is, she won a three-year term. It must have seemed like a disappointment for the first-time politician, but in 1995 Arroyo ran again for a full six-year term and this time topped the Senate race, immediately becoming a viable presidential or vice presidential candidate for 1998.)

Why do I bring up Panelo’s dismal record in his single attempt at national office? Elective office is a bruising affair and it is entirely to Panelo’s credit that, at least once in his life, he threw his own hat into the ring. We should not gainsay his attempt.

But it seems he learned one lesson from his defeat: If he had the appetite for politics but not the personality for elections, he can serve winnable politicians in an advisory capacity.