CHICKENPIE.The lawyer adjusts his tie. He does this, I've read, seventeen times before a major hearing — not out of nervousness, but out of ritual. Every lawyer in that building has a tie-adjustment ritual. The building itself has a rhythm: you can set your watch by when the airconditioning hum drops to a lower frequency, signaling the afternoon session.
In a few months, the Senate will try Sara Duterte.
The defense team — bless them, they know the score — has already said the impeachment case will reach trial. This is not a concession. This is a strategy. Conceding the trial is the easiest part when you're three years into a process that moves like wet concrete.
Here's what we know: the Vice President faces allegations of using public office to settle political scores. If true, it's the kind of thing that should end a career. The question is not whether it happened. The question is what "ending" looks like when it takes half a decade to arrive.
The Long Game Is Not a Defense. It's the Point.
The math is simple. File an impeachment in 2024. Senate trials take eighteen months minimum. Add appeals, procedural challenges, the inevitable motion to recuse this judge and that panel — you're looking at 2027, 2028, maybe beyond. By then, the political landscape has shifted. The public's attention has been poured into a dozen other crises. The original sin is still there, technically, but it's become furniture. Background noise.
We've seen this before. Not in the Philippines — everywhere. The speed of accountability is inversely proportional to the rank of the person being held to account. A shoplifter goes to court in three months. A senator goes to court in three years. A vice president goes to court when enough of the paperwork has turned the color of old ivory.
The defense knows this. The lawyer adjusts his tie. The airconditioning drops. The trial happens. The point does not.
What the Lawyers Know That We Don't
There is a reason the defense called it early: they know something we don't, or something we do know but have chosen to forget. That the trial is not the event. The announcement of the trial is the event. Once the trial starts, it becomes process. Process is boring. Process is where outrage goes to become archive.
Sara Duterte resigned from the Cabinet in January. She did this before the impeachment trial was even formally calendared — a move that had all the markings of someone who understood the timeline better than her critics. Take the Cabinet loss, keep the VP salary, stay in the building, wait for the process to exhaust itself.
The husband's move against the BSP? Even better. Sue the regulator. That's not defiance — that's resource management. Every lawsuit filed is a delay request. Every delay is a month the other side has to pay lawyers who bill by the hour while the public quietly moves on.
Chickenpie's Take
We invented the word hugot because we needed somewhere to put the receipts for everything we said we'd fix and didn't. Impeachment is the hugot of accountability. A place to put all the feelings that the system is going to move correctly, eventually, for sure — and then it doesn't.
The lawyer adjusts his tie. Seventeen times before a major hearing.
The point doesn't arrive on time. It arrives when no one's watching anymore, and by then the point is no longer the point. It's just another trial in a building where the airconditioning hums at exactly the frequency it has always hummed.
