IF our diplomatic row with China escalates, that would result in the final push that could send an already fragile Philippine economy over the edge. That would unleash so much outrage that President Marcos would be toppled, just as his father was before his term ends in 2028.

KISHORE Mahbubani, the founding dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, told earlier this month an audience at Ateneo de Manila University that the rivalry between the United States and China is the defining contest of the era, and that the Philippines, which sits on its fault line, must be “very, very careful.” The danger would touch every ASEAN country, he said, but “may actually be especially difficult for the Philippines.”

PRESIDENT Ferdinand Marcos Jr. undertook the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte to block the shoo-in for the presidency in 2028, so he could get somebody to his liking. If that was the strategy, the latest evidence suggests it has backfired — not because Sara has been untouched by controversy, but because the proceedings have transformed her from an embattled vice president into the country’s most visible opposition figure. The persecution against her has only strengthened her charisma. That fits with philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous aphorism: “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

The more the administration has tried to claim Sara Duterte’s guilt, on trial, the more the public has placed Marcos Jr. and his government on trial. The impeachment was intended to test Sara’s fitness for office. Instead, it has intensified doubts about the administration’s motives, performance and morality.

Indeed, Marcos’ minions have become so desperate as to even accuse Sara, as Philippine Star columnist and former Estrada go-fer Ronaldo Llamas did, of being a “traitor” for being linked to a company that was exporting products to China.

THE controversy over whether the Senate can reduce the votes required to convict an impeached official from 16 to 14 raises a question far more consequential than the fate of Vice President Sara Duterte. If senators can change an explicit numerical requirement of the Constitution through their own procedural rules, what prevents Congress from similarly altering other safeguards — including, and especially, the rules for amending the Constitution itself?

Article XI, Section 3(6) of the 1987 Constitution states: “No person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two-thirds of all the Members of the Senate.”

With 24 sitting senators, that requires 16 affirmative votes. It does not say two-thirds of those present, those voting, or those who have not abstained. The phrase is “all the Members.”

The proposed reduction to 14 would require excluding some senators from the denominator. Disguised as a technical adjustment, it raises a fundamental issue: Can a chamber’s procedural rules change the voting requirements categorically stipulated by the Constitution? If so, the implications extend well beyond impeachment. Numerous constitutional provisions demand specified fractions of all members precisely because certain powers should not be exercised by an ordinary political majority.

MY condolences to the family of Cesar Virata, who passed away on Oct. 2. However, especially since I seem to be alone in this venture, I cannot acquiesce to not pointing out that he was one of the two pillars of martial law, the other being the late Juan Ponce Enrile. Virata was in charge of the economy, Enrile the military.

That regime resulted in such an economic catastrophe for the country, which started in 1983, that it took us 22 years, not until 2004, to recover the GDP per capita level that year of $1,898. Countless Filipinos died of starvation and lived in misery because of that economic disaster.

If there is any single explanation for our underdevelopment, it is that crisis from 1983 to 1985.

And who was managing the economy for the dictator Marcos since 1972 that led to that quagmire?

It is the height of intellectual dishonesty — and a shameless misrepresentation of history — for the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the Foundation for Economic Freedom and other big business organizations to deliver panegyrics in the late Cesar Virata’s honor without even mentioning the term “martial law.” It’s as if Albert Speer were honored as one of Germany’s greatest economic managers without mentioning that he was Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production.

Virata ignored the human rights abuses, the torture and killings of many of my comrades during martial law. As a reporter covering Virata in the early 1980s, I asked him why he wasn’t protesting human rights abuses when he was by then the prime minister, the second most powerful man in the country at that time. He scolded me: “It’s obvious I’m busy with other duties.”

THE diabolical accounting trick that unjustly tainted Chief Justice Renato Corona’s reputation 14 years ago, which was used as the smokescreen for the Senate impeachment court to convict him in 2012, is shamelessly being used again in the trial of Vice President Sara Duterte.

It is breathtaking that the same deception can be attempted twice before the same institution, the Senate sitting as an impeachment court. Dress up billions of pesos of movements through bank accounts as if these represented billions accumulated by the accused. Repeat the gigantic figure endlessly. Put it in headlines. Contrast it with the much smaller figure in the official’s statement of assets, liabilities and net worth.

Then leave ordinary Filipinos with the impression that the difference represents hidden wealth.

It worked against Corona. The prosecutors obviously hope it will work against Sara.

The Anti-Money Laundering Council’s executive director Ronel Buenaventura testified Monday that AMLC records showed P4.4 billion in “covered” and “suspicious” transactions involving Sara and her husband, lawyer Manases Carpio, from 2007 to 2025.

But P4.4 billion in transactions is not P4.4 billion in wealth, nor inflows. It is a deliberate misinterpretation of the modern technique of double-entry accounting, which had been invented among other thing things as a built-in error detection: Inflows are recorded as credits, outflows debits. The “bottom” line is net assets, what you would own after all the pluses and minuses cancel out. Yet the prosecution has made it appear that Sara and her husband had actual inflows of P4.4 billion. Even an intelligent, experienced media practitioner like Karen Davila in her interview yesterday with the defense spokesman believed that, and asked the spokesman if this amount came from financial contributions.

WOULD the military respect a defense secretary who, despite already enjoying wealth and privilege in the Philippines, chose to acquire citizenship in another country? That is the question Gilberto “Gibo” Teodoro Jr. must answer about his decision to become a Maltese citizen in 2014. 

As important as that question, in the light of rumors that President Marcos Jr. is considering to support him as his presidential candidate in 2028: Would the country trust a rich individual who spent P105 million for him, his wife and son to become Maltese citizens?

His subsequent documented renunciation does not erase the decision that made that necessary. Soldiers asked to stake their lives in this country are entitled to scrutinize the character of their civilian leader — especially one who directs defense policy — who was willing to abandon his native land. Filipinos should be skeptical of Teodoro, who has been thumping his chest professing to be a resolute nationalist who treats China as an enemy, even feared to be provoking that superpower to go to war against the Philippines — when his links to Malta and the entire European Union that tiny country is a member of, would make it easier for him to leave the country at the drop of a hat.

That he can do so if his wife and son, who had become Maltese citizens with him in 2016, have not renounced such citizenship. I emailed Teodoro and his lawyers to ask whether they did. As of my submission of this column to our editorial desk, I haven’t received any reply from them.

Teodoro’s Maltese citizenship was disclosed to the public by a Manila Times reporter way back in July 2025. His “Renunciation of Maltese Citizenship,” sworn to on Sept. 30, 2021, before a notary public and submitted to the Comelec on Oct. 7, 2021, when he filed his candidacy for senator, was very strangely unreported by media.

THIRTY-ONE trial days in, the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte has collapsed under the weight of what it never had: a witness who can say, under oath, that Sara herself stole money, ordered someone else to steal it, or personally pocketed a single peso of it. The prosecution has produced boxes of records, confidential-fund liquidation papers, bank statements, corporate filings — and, most recently, Sara’s own brother.

What it has not produced after a month of trial is the one thing an impeachment for graft and corruption actually requires: a direct line from the money to her.

The impeachment project has all but imploded. The Fates seem to have conspired to get Sara’s brother, Davao Mayor Sebastian Duterte, to make a dramatic appearance at the trial, stupidly subpoenaed by the prosecutors themselves. Clad in an all-black suit, Baste Duterte exuded a quiet gravitas and undeniable charisma, stepping into the impeachment trial like a stoic executioner telling the conspirators that the impeachment will soon be led to the gallows. Even the prosecutor Teodoro Te, a human rights lawyer, appeared to have cowed under Baste’s gravitas that he stammered while asking him questions.

The House persecutors have been ignorant of what an impeachment is. The Constitution allows removal of a high official for “high crimes” that make them unfit for public office: culpable violation of the Constitution, treason, bribery, graft and corruption, or betrayal of public trust — not for messy bookkeeping. Documentation defects and liquidation irregularities may be real, and the prosecution insists its evidence already proves misuse and misappropriation. What they are really claiming is their own inference, not proof.