I did not think of law when I read the Supreme Court ruling. I did not think of doctrines, footnotes, or technical phrases. What came to my mind was basketball—because that is how Filipinos understand fairness, struggle, and heartbreak.
I imagined Gilas Pilipinas about to face China. The players were ready. The lineup was strong. The coaches had studied every move, every weakness, every possible adjustment. The country was watching. There was no promise of victory, only the hope of a fair fight. The anthem played. The ball was ready at center court. And then, just before the tip-off, the whistle blew—not for a foul, not for a violation, but to cancel the game entirely. Papers filed weeks ago were suddenly enough to erase months of preparation. No first quarter. No defense. No chance to see what the team was made of.
That was the heaviness I felt when the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte was stopped—not because the accusations were proven false, not because the evidence was weak, but because the process itself was declared invalid before it was allowed to breathe.
I have spent years teaching young minds, serving in public safety, and observing how institutions work under pressure. I respect rules. I understand procedure. But I also know that rules were never meant to silence the truth before it speaks. Preparation means nothing if you are never allowed to step onto the court.
I lived through the impeachment of President Joseph Estrada. I remember those days vividly. The country felt tense, divided, restless. Allegations were read on television. Evidence was debated openly. Senators argued not as polished performers but as human beings burdened by history. It was noisy. It was emotional. It was flawed. But it was alive. The process moved forward, imperfectly, painfully, but visibly. The Supreme Court did not stop the game mid-play. It did not disqualify the match before the first whistle. It allowed the political process to unfold, to struggle, and eventually to collapse under the weight of reality.
Only after the nation had already felt the breaking point did the Court step in—not to judge the impeachment, but to recognize what had already happened on the ground. That was restraint. That was trust in democracy, messy as it was.
Today, the feeling is different. In the Sara Duterte case, the game never started. The Court did not wait for evidence to be weighed or arguments to be tested. It did not allow the House to fully deliberate or the Senate to even prepare for trial. Instead, it ruled that earlier complaints—some barely heard, some barely acted upon—had already triggered a constitutional clock. And just like that, the door closed.
It was at this point that the words of SP Tito Sotto echoed with painful clarity. When he said that impeachment has now become an “impossible dream,” he was not exaggerating. He was expressing a hard truth that many citizens quietly felt but could not articulate. If impeachment can be stopped before it even reaches the Senate—before evidence is weighed, before truth is tested—then accountability itself begins to feel unreachable, almost theoretical.
To lawyers, this may sound correct, even elegant. To ordinary Filipinos, it feels cold. It feels like telling a team that trained with discipline and sacrifice that their efforts no longer matter because of a technicality they did not commit. It leaves people staring at an empty court, asking softly, “So we will never know?”
When people ask me if the Supreme Court contradicted itself compared to the Estrada case, I answer carefully. On paper, no. The doctrines were not overturned. The language of the Constitution was not rewritten. But as a citizen, as an educator, and as a father explaining this to the next generation, I feel something deeper. The Court may not have contradicted its words, but it changed how it referees democracy.
Before, the Court trusted the people and their representatives to wrestle with truth, even if the fight was ugly. Now, it trusts procedure more than process, finality more than participation. One approach allows the game to be played, even if it ends in heartbreak. The other ends the game before anyone breaks a sweat.
This is why many Filipinos are not angry—they are simply sad.
Impeachment was never meant to be comfortable. It was designed to be painful, revealing, and risky. The one-year bar was meant to protect officials from harassment, not to shield them from ever being questioned. When procedure becomes a wall instead of a guide, accountability quietly slips away—until what was once a constitutional safeguard becomes, as Senator Sotto warned, an impossible dream.
In basketball, Filipinos do not demand automatic victory from Gilas. We only ask for a fair chance to fight, to lose honorably if we must, or to win honestly if we can. In democracy, it is the same. We are not asking for convictions. We are not demanding acquittals. We are only asking that the game be allowed to begin.
Because when the whistle blows too early, no one truly wins. We are all left watching an empty court, wondering what truth might have emerged—if only the ball had been tossed.
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