Trillanes should be jailed, the Senate abolished

WITH its coddling of cashiered mutineer Antonio Trillanes IV, the senator with the atrocious history of two coup attempts against the government, the Senate has shown its true nature — an obstructionist group of egotistical politicians who do nothing but thwart the will of the people.

The Senate’s closing ranks on Trillanes — whose faulty amnesty has been voided — reminds me of a fraternity protecting a member implicated in a hazing death. They don’t care if the member beat to death a neophyte, or if the member betrayed the country through treasonous, seditious acts; they will still protect him because he is one of their own.

As his fellow senators vow that their colleague the putchist will never be arrested inside the Senate, the rest of the country have heaped their scorn on this useless and irrelevant chamber. Everytime we elect a new senator, we are creating a multi-millionaire egotist who thinks his or her only job is to remain in the limelight by holding as many public hearings as possible.

The current crop of senators have become experts in criticizing the people in government who do actual jobs, such as those in the executive department. Is this why we elect senators and pay them so much money, so that we can hear them lambast people left and right?

One remembers how in one their public hearings (otherwise known as the “in aid of legislation” media events), Senator Trillanes verbally abused and insulted a resource person, General Angelo Reyes, whose sense of honor was so acute he committed suicide in front of his mother’s grave.

Trillanes said afterwards he wasn’t sorry with the way he treated Reyes. Yes, this is the kind of person this putchist is. No matter how many statues of the Virgin Mary he carries, Trillanes remains as the arrogant megalomaniac who wants to be president despite getting only 800,000 votes when he ran for vice president in 2016.

The Senate, even without Trillanes, is nothing more than an old boys’ network composed of traditional politicians who survive every change in the political landscape, demi-celebrities who are married to real ones, and new faces with the money and connections to get themselves elected. No intellectuals here, forget it.

There is another member of the Senate that is in trouble with the law, Senator Leila de Lima, who is incarcerated in Camp Crame on drug charges. De Lima is accused of colluding with drug lords, giving them protection, in exchange for money. This as testified by several prison officials, drug lords, and even De Lima’s former driver and lover, Ronnie Dayan. Yes, this is how low our Senate has fallen, and lower still with Trillanes’ imminent arrest.

*** As I’ve consistently argued in this column, we will be better off with a federal government with a single chamber, the Parliament. This is the more efficient system, with no more back and forth between chambers, and we will save a huge amount of taxpayer’s money by paying only a single group of legislators.

If not for the Lower House, the Philippines would not have been able to pass important legislation. Many more are still pending because of Senate inaction. Indeed former House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez in his frustration once called the Senate the “Mabagal na Kapulungan” (the slow chamber).

The senators are always too busy politicking to study and discuss important laws. For instance, recently they called to a hearing agriculture officials just so they can berate them publicly. This, instead of discussing the proposed rice tarrification law, which the executive department has said can solve the rice supply problem.

*** On signing Proclamation No. 572, President Duterte declared as void from the start the amnesty given to Trillanes in 2010 by the previous administration. Apparently, Trillanes did not file a proper application for amnesty and there are questions on the legal basis of his freedom.

The Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Defense Department have no record of the amnesty application supposedly filed by Trillanes. He also failed to submit a written admission of his guilt for his crimes when he attempted to overthrow the government of president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

Trillanes committed rebellion and sedition twice. In the first one in 2003, he and his Magdalo group holed up in a fancy hotel in Makati, and in the second in 2007 they occupied an even swankier one, again in Makati. They ran scared and surrendered when tanks barged into the Manila Peninsula Hotel.

One of the clearer explanations for the nullification of Trillanes’ amnesty has come from Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo. He likened it to the pardons given to prisoners who had been convicted of crimes.

“Your amnesty is akin to conditional pardon. If you were given conditional pardon, you need to comply with the terms and conditions. If you do not comply, it will be cancelled,” Panelo said.

Trillanes not only failed to meet the requirements of the law; he also abused the amnesty with his succeeding actions challenging the government, according to Panelo. (This includes in my mind his unsubstantiated charges of hidden wealth against President Duterte whom Trillanes obviously has not forgiven for not taking him on as a vice presidential candidate-partner in the 2016 elections.)

Yes indeed, if you were a convicted murderer who was pardoned, and then you murdered another person, how do you think the law will treat you? If you were a former destabilizer of a legitimate government, and then you continued to challenge the government, what does that say of you?

“What did he do? He’s sowing terror, anger, and he’s inciting the public to rise up against the government and President Duterte,” Panelo said. The government, he said, has the right to protect itself from assault coming from any individual.

***

Another major defect of Trillanes’ amnesty: it seems that it was then Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin who recommended and granted the amnesty to Trillanes, and not former president Benigno Aquino III.

Aquino only signed a general amnesty, Proclamation No. 50, for the mutineers that participated in the Oakwood and Manila Peninsula mutinies. Aquino’s proclamation of amnesty was not specific to Trillanes.

According to President Duterte, Gazmin can be charged with usurpation of authority for doing this as the power to pardon and grant amnesty is solely vested in the president as clearly stated in the Constitution.

The invalidation of Trillanes’ amnesty based on Duterte’ Proclamation 572 means that he has reverted to the status of an active military personnel, according to military and defense officials. This means that once he is arrested; he will be turned over to custody of the military police.

The people have to wait a bit however for Trillanes’ court martial. Because we are a democratic country with working courts (take note, New York Times), Trillanes was able to file a petition before the Supreme Court seeking a temporary restraining order against the voiding of his amnesty.

But the odds are stacked against him, legally speaking, and there is of course the matter of his constant insults and verbal abuses of the Supreme Court justices.

So we wait and see. Until then, let us enjoy the fact that the putchist Trillanes was finally hit with a karmic comeuppance.