CHICKENPIEThe pre-trial brief is due today. Not “under review.” Not “pending clearance.” Not “subject to further deliberation by the appropriate body.” Today. June 15. To the Senate. In writing. With sources.
For the first time in a very long time, Sara Duterte has homework.
This is the woman who watched her father’s administration treat accountability as something that happened to other people — a process deployed against opponents, against journalists, against the poor man in the wrong barangay at the wrong time. Not against the family. Never against the family. The family was the process.
She grew up watching power work that way. Why would she believe the homework would ever come due?
But here’s the thing about paperwork: it doesn’t respect origin stories. A pre-trial brief is not interested in who your father is. It wants legal theory. It wants a response to the prosecution’s specific charges: corruption, misuse of confidential funds, an alleged plot to assassinate President Marcos, First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, and Speaker Martin Romualdez. Not alleged in the way that things are alleged on social media — alleged in the way that the House of Representatives voted on it, and the Senate was notified, and now there is a date, a room, a chair, and a gavel.
The gavel is also unimpressed with dynasties.
What makes this particular moment funny — not funny ha-ha, but funny the way you laugh when you drop something that’s been balanced on the edge of a counter for years — is the sheer ordinariness of it. There is allegedly a plot to kill three people in this document. It has been formatted with proper paragraph breaks. It is being delivered to the Senate Office of the Secretary in a folder. With index tabs.
A court date. A deadline. A document due by end of day. These are things millions of Filipinos navigate constantly: tax forms, barangay permits, NBI clearances, DTI applications that require a photo and three forms of ID and patience. The machinery of process, grinding away, indifferent.
Now it grinds in her direction.
The trial proper starts July 6. There will be sessions. There will be testimony. There will be a verdict, eventually. The Senate chamber will not transform into something mythological — it will just be a room, with chairs and microphones, and people reading documents into the record.
Sometimes that’s the most radical thing a country can do. Make the room ordinary. Make the process apply.
The chicken’s watching from the gallery. Good seats, honestly.
