PRESIDENT Ferdinand Marcos Jr. certainly scored a lot of points when he announced within the first two minutes of his State of the Nation Address (SONA) that the Ombudsman is “close to filing a lot” (patong patong) of (corruption) charges against the former House speaker. He couldn’t get himself to name the person referred to, his cousin Martin Romualdez, though.

I’m not holding my breath though. We’ll know it’s for real only when the Ombudsman sends that cousin to jail, as fast as he did the most articulate opposition senator, Rodante Marcoleta, as well as former congressman Michael Defensor. 

We could be moving into “interesting times” with Marcos’ announcement. Romualdez said angrily in an April video message: “If this is a political play to push me out and close the story, tarnishing my name and my reputation, then I am telling everyone now: I will not go quietly, and I will not go alone. I will not be the fall guy for other people’s corruption.” Many interpreted the “other people” as Marcos and his wife.

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THE most damning indictment of Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s administration is not any single scandal, but the pattern. Since 2022, an extraordinary share of the Marcos administration’s energy, money, and attention has gone not into governing, but into a single, unstated project: making sure the Marcos clan survives as the dominant Lord of the Realm, and ideally expands, past 2028, when the president’s single six-year term expires.

Marcos is, indeed, the son of the dictator, who clung to power after his second and constitutionally last term by weaponizing the Constitution to declare one-man rule in September 1972.

Charter change, the impeachment war against Vice President Sara Duterte, and the extraordinary decision to hand former president Rodrigo Duterte to a foreign tribunal are not isolated events. They are three fronts of the same battle for continuity in power.

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THE impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte is neither a project to cleanse the government of corruption nor is it a partisan brawl. It has become a struggle for democracy itself, to prevent the Marcos family from thwarting the will of the people, from choosing their president in 2028.

The case against Sara is the most brazen use of constitutional processes as political weapons. It echoes in disturbing detail the way his father weaponized the Constitution half a century ago to cling to power for 13 years.

In 1972, Marcos Sr. was a year from ending his third term, with the Constitution barring him from a fourth term. His archenemy, the fiery opposition leader senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. was inarguably a shoo-in to become president in the 1974 elections. Marcos, however, exploited the martial‑law clause of the 1935 Constitution — intended for genuine emergencies like invasion or rebellion — and bent it into a blanket license for dictatorship.

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THE Senate impeachment court’s ruling allowing the prosecution to subpoena Vice President Sara Duterte’s financial records is being sold by Akbayan Rep. Jose Manuel Diokno as a major victory. In fact, it buries the unexplained wealth article by sharply limiting what financial records can be used.

The court did grant subpoenas for bank records, Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) reports, and Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) documents going back to 2007. But it added a crucial condition: Records from before Sara Duterte became vice president may be used only to establish a financial “baseline,” not to prosecute alleged impeachable acts outside the articles of impeachment. 

That restriction, not the mere issuance of subpoenas, is the heart of the ruling.

The written order makes this explicit. The requested records are “sought to establish the Respondent’s financial baseline and capacity, and not to inquire into or prosecute alleged impeachable acts occurring outside the present Articles of Impeachment.” These “are required to establish a factual baseline against which the Respondent’s assets, financial transactions and business interests during her present term may be assessed.” In simple terms: Pre‑2022 records cannot be used to prove corruption committed before Duterte assumed the vice presidency; they can only show what her legitimate financial position was at that point.

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LAST Wednesday, the House prosecution panel did something no confident litigator would ever do: It abandoned its own witnesses en masse, signaling they were giving up on their absurd “kill-BBM” impeachment charge, Article 4 of the case against Sara Duterte.

Lead prosecutor and Batangas Rep. Gerville Luistro announced they would no longer present six witnesses lined up to prove Article IV — the charge that Vice President Sara Duterte threatened to have President Marcos, the first lady and former House speaker Martin Romualdez killed if she is killed, presumably as ordered by them. Even the defense was surprised that the prosecution had withdrawn its subpoena for Sara’s chief of staff, Zuleika Lopez, to testify.

Private prosecutor Lorna Kapunan, reportedly the prosecution team’s star lawyer, had to be deployed to add to two prosecutors’ blah-blahs to “manifest” — in violation of fair-play procedure, the presiding judge Sen. Francis Escudero later ruled — that the past two witnesses had already argued sufficiently for the threat charge, and they just wanted to save the court’s time.

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MERALCO’S July rate hike is more than a routine monthly adjustment. Buried in the utility’s own supplier breakdown is a stark illustration of what it actually costs the country to depend on imported liquefied natural gas (LNG) instead of gas produced at home.

The gap between the two is no longer a rounding error — it is now the single clearest argument for why the Philippines needs to protect what remains of its indigenous gas supply.

Meralco’s residential rate rose by P0.3428 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) in July, from P14.4833/kWh in June to P14.8261/kWh — enough to add roughly P69 to the monthly bill of a household consuming 200 kWh.

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TEN years since the 2016 arbitral award on the Philippine suit vs China, this paper ran two columns side by side on July 14 — one by Orlando “Orly” Mercado, who once headed the Department of National Defense, and one by Rafael “Raffy” Alunan III, who once headed the Department of Interior and Local Government under Fidel Ramos. Both are intelligent men. And both, reading their columns together, produced almost interchangeable pieces that could have been drafted at a Pentagon or State Department press shop.

Mercado opens by calling the 2016 arbitral ruling “one of the greatest legal victories” in our history, one that supposedly established our “sovereign rights” over the West Philippine Sea and rejected China’s claims outright.

Only President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his mouthpieces make this claim. None of the countries closest to us, the Asean countries — even Vietnam and Malaysia that have similar maritime disputes with China — share Marcos’ delusion.

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AT 2:29 a.m. on Nov. 23, 2024, Zuleika Lopez — Vice President Sara Duterte’s chief of staff and close personal friend of over two decades — was found vomiting and shaking in a House of Representatives detention room, in the throes of what her doctors would later diagnose as acute stress disorder.

Hours earlier, the Marcos-controlled House Committee on Good Government and Public Accountability had ordered Lopez detained for contempt for not “fully cooperating with the committee,” and later directed that she be transferred not to an ordinary congressional holding room, but to the Correctional Institution for Women in Mandaluyong, the prison where convicted female criminals serve out their sentences.

In desperation, Sara Duterte physically blocked the transfer, introduced herself not as the vice president but as Lopez’s lawyer, and refused to leave the premises. She called it, bluntly, attempted homicide. It was the House committee’s attempt to get Lopez to implicate her in some imagined crime. It was also a message that they could do what they wanted even if she was the second most powerful official in the land.

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MARCOS’ twin plot to secure his regime’s hold on power — the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte and the crushing of opposition figures, symbolized by the jailing of Sen. Rodante Marcoleta — effectively began yesterday, as if some exasperated deity, tired of Filipino blindness, decided to compress the opening shots into a single day so no one could pretend not to see.

Hours after the Senate impeachment court moved from preliminaries into the formal trial phase against VP Sara, the Sandiganbayan anti-graft court — over the weekend after the Ombudsman filed the case last Friday — scrambled to raffle the case to its Third Division, which promptly ordered the arrest of the pro-Duterte Marcoleta on some absurd charge of plunder.

The Senate, already convened as an impeachment court since May 18, had locked in July 6 as the start of the trial proper, with senators sitting four afternoons a week as “judges” in what is the biggest political case of this administration. On that same date, Marcoleta went to the Third Division, thinking he could argue for the case to be dismissed. Instead, he was led away by the Philippine National Police’s (PNP) burly policemen, handcuffed and hauled to the PNP jail in Payatas, in a convoy of vans and SUVs.

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