If only we had a functioning accountability system, Pia Cayetano would have been removed by now as a senator judge in the Sara Duterte impeachment trial, for posting an edited video of her exchange with Chel Diokno which was obviously intended to distort the official and on-record narrative of how exactly that exchange took shape.
Cayetano spliced the video and posted it in her social media page to undercut her point in favor of the defense and make Diokno sound like he was admitting that the prosecution had no evidence against the vice president and was merely on a fishing expedition in demanding access to bank transaction records.
There was hushed reaction, if at all, from the other senator judges hearing the case. There was no formal censure and it looked like the institution meant to police itself has instead practiced a discipline of collective avoidance.
Senate President and presiding judge Chiz Escudero said nothing. Not one senator-judge — not the ones who spend hearings invoking the gravity of the oath, not the ones who lecture the gallery on impartiality —rose to say that a colleague manufacturing propaganda against a prosecutor mid-trial is a problem for the tribunal itself, not just for her. It was as if institutional integrity were a private matter between Cayetano and her conscience, and not the collective inheritance of every senator who took the same oath she did.
No senator judge stood up on the floor to say that a member of the court had knowingly circulated a doctored video traceable to a partisan disinformation page. It took a cause-oriented group — Tindig Pilipinas, a coalition of women’s rights advocates and academics — to file an ethics complaint against Cayetano.
That asymmetry is the actual scandal, and it says a lot about this impeachment court. We have a chamber that will spend months litigating a vice president’s culpability while declining to spend one session litigating whether one of its own manufactured a lie to influence that very trial.
This institution does not need Pia Cayetano to explain herself away to the public. It has already done the explaining itself, by saying nothing at all.
