When I had the privilege of visiting the Princeton University in New Jersey, USA, not too long ago, as part of my constant global academic peregrinations, I came across with an excellent book titled “The Impeachment Power, The Law, Politics And Purpose of An Extraordinary Constitutional Tool” written by a learned and erudite political writer, Keith E. Whittington. It was an excellent read. I completed reading it aboard my plane from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Manila.
The author derived multiple insights from British and American histories and incisively drew conclusions that provide useful guides to the many parliaments, congresses, and assemblies across 180 countries all over the world. Impeachment is being extolled as the peoples’ effective tool, via their respective deputies and representatives in legislative bodies, to curb the abuses of elected executive officials. It is an important pillar that reinforces the fundamental principle of checks and balances.
As a Law professor in some universities in Metro Manila, it behooves me to brush up on my knowledge of impeachment so that I can impart accurate meanings, purposes and implications of the concepts and principles that I teach future lawyers, pundits, and budding philosophers. The national buzzword nowadays is ‘impeachment’. Thus, I indulge my readers, social platforms followers, and students on this hot topic.
This word “impeachment” traces its etymology to the ancient French word “empeechier”, which they borrowed from its Latin original term “impedire” or ensnaring by foot, which then developed into the old English term of ‘impede’. The common meaning of all such terms is to obstruct, prevent, derail, and stop. The bottom line of all these processes is to protect the people from the excesses of an executive official.
The process of preventing leaders from doing more harm was used by the English Parliament in the second half of the 14th century to stop Baron William Latimer, a despicable member of the House of Lords and advisor to King Edward III, from further harming the people. He was the first person in world history to be removed by impeachment in the year 1376. Borrowing from the English example, the New England states of Virginia, circa 1776 and Massachusetts, in 1780 enshrined this mechanism as the peoples’ means to remove abusive and undesirable officials.
Over the centuries, impeachment has become an effective tool by which the peoples across continents and nations would usually reserve in their fundamental laws, this power to remove powerful executive officials who abuse the powers of their offices, exceed the legal and moral bounds of their positions and wreak havoc with the rights, interests, and well-being of the whole nation.
Our research into the records of the United Nations yielded a finding that, from 1990 to 2020 alone, there had been no less than 272 impeachment charges against 132 heads of states in 63 countries. From 1978 to 2019, in Latin America alone, 10 presidents from seven countries were removed from office by their respective legislative bodies using the process of impeachment, which some of those countries call legislative declaration of executive incapacity.
I am encouraging fellow professors of Constitutional Law, Political Law and government officials as well as students and the intelligentsia to participate actively in academic conversations, symposia, fora, debates, and argumentation in order to better understand impeachment as a process. We should stop the ignorant noise in social media that tends to spread some twisted forms of eccentric stupidity.
It behooves us to elevate the quality of social media dialogue so as to awaken the people into the pure meaning of impeachment beyond the partisan twists and turns of traditional and dirty politicking.