CHICKENPIE.The INC showed up on EDSA on June 30. You know what EDSA looks like when the INC shows up. You've seen the photos. Buses from the provinces. Lanes closed. White polo shirts as far as the camera can reach. The expressway, which normally moves cars from Monumento to MRT-3 in about forty-five minutes, moved nobody anywhere.
This time the grievance was Rodante Marcoleta. The senator faces non-bailable plunder charges filed by the Ombudsman — this is the same Marcoleta who cast a key vote when the ABS-CBN franchise was killed, the same one who kept the NTC from issuing a provisional authority while the House stalled for time. If you were keeping score in 2020, you remember the name. The INC's argument is that the charges represent selective justice. There are many charges in this republic. The INC wants this specific one addressed.
All of this is, by INC standards, fairly normal. They mobilize. They fill the expressway. They wait.
What is not standard is who noticed.
Sara Duterte told reporters on Tuesday that the EDSA rally reflects what she described as a "growing sentiment" against the Marcos administration. She said this on camera, carefully, the way a person reads weather data from a neutral instrument. Not a calculation. Meteorology.
Her impeachment trial starts July 6.
The person who is, in four days, walking into a Senate chamber to answer allegations that she plotted to assassinate the president — including the spending of confidential funds that to this day cannot be fully accounted for — wanted you to understand that the people on EDSA are upset. They are. About something else. But she was holding the microphone.
The INC has been here since 1914. They mobilize, they fill an expressway, and nobody in the Philippines has yet figured out how to stop that — not because it's uncivil, but because it works. Marcoleta's case runs through the Sandiganbayan. Sara's trial begins next week. Sixteen senators are the only number anyone in the country is actually watching.
What the INC wanted out of June 30 was Marcoleta treated fairly. What Sara wanted was thirty thousand people she could point at while walking into the Senate building four days later.
EDSA has been used for lots of things since 1986. This is the first time someone tried to use it as a character reference.
