10/2/26

My friends and countrymen, on the 30th day of the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte last Monday, Police Major Joericson Sangalang of the Philippine National Police Firearms and Explosives Office testified that 51 firearms were registered to Duterte and her husband, lawyer Manases Carpio. Several senator-judges questioned the relevance of this testimony. Senator Juan Miguel Zubiri, who described himself as a "pro-gun" legislator, emphasized that owning firearms in the Philippines is a privilege, not a constitutional right, unlike the right to bear arms under the United States Constitution. Zubiri's distinction between the Philippine privilege and the American constitutional right was more significant than it may have appeared in the moment, because it identified a constitutional difference that every Filipino citizen should understand. The framework that protects American gun owners simply does not exist in the Philippines. It has never existed. The history of Philippine law confirms this without ambiguity, and the Philippine Supreme Court has settled the question definitively.

In my commentary, "The Case for the Conviction of Vice President Sara Duterte," I examined the broader constitutional grounds for her conviction. The constitutional framework behind the firearms testimony, however, deserves its own examination.

The Deliberate Omission of 1902

When the United States Congress enacted the Philippine Bill of 1902 to serve as the organic law of the Insular Government of the Philippine Islands, it transplanted many provisions from the American Bill of Rights. It incorporated protections for speech, due process, and the free exercise of religion. It did not, however, include the Second Amendment. The omission was deliberate, not accidental.

The context was the Philippine-American War of 1899 to 1902 and its aftermath. The United States was governing a territory where armed resistance remained active, where private armies were common among provincial elites, and where the colonial administration's primary security concern was pacification and the establishment of civil order. Granting a constitutional right to bear arms to a population the United States had just fought a war to subdue would have been directly contrary to American colonial security interests. The colonial government needed to control the flow and possession of firearms, not constitutionally protect it. No congressional committee report from the 1902 deliberations has been identified that states the exclusion of the Second Amendment in explicit terms. The historical circumstances, however, leave little room for an alternative explanation. A colonial government engaged in active pacification of armed resistance does not constitutionally guarantee the right to bear arms to the population it is pacifying.

An Omission That Carried Through Every Constitution

The exclusion established in 1902 was never reversed. The 1935 Commonwealth Constitution, drafted under American supervision and ratified by the Filipino people, did not include a right to bear arms. The 1973 Constitution, enacted during the Marcos era, did not include it. The 1987 Constitution, drafted in the aftermath of the People Power Revolution and ratified as the supreme law of the restored republic, did not include it either. Across four constitutions spanning more than a century, no Philippine constitutional convention and no Philippine legislature has ever elevated firearms ownership from a regulated privilege to a constitutional right.

The Supreme Court Has Settled the Question

The Philippine Supreme Court has confirmed this history in its jurisprudence. In the landmark case of Chavez v. Romulo (G.R. No. 157036, 2004), the Court stated: "Our Constitution contains no provision similar to the Second Amendment, as we aptly observed in the early case of United States vs. Pomeroy." In Acosta v. Ochoa (G.R. No. 211559), the Court ruled with equal clarity: "The history of our laws reveals that we Filipinos have never had such constitutional right. None of our Constitutions ever provided the right to bear arms." The Court further stated that "the right to bear arms is a mere statutory privilege, not a constitutional right."

Because the right is statutory rather than constitutional, the State may regulate gun ownership freely through its police power without facing constitutional challenge. The current governing statute is Republic Act No. 10591, the Comprehensive Firearms and Ammunition Regulation Act of 2013, which requires all firearms to be registered with the PNP Firearms and Explosives Office and imposes licensing requirements on every citizen who seeks to own one. This is a fundamental distinction that separates the Philippine legal framework from the American one.

The Practical Consequence for the Impeachment Trial

The distinction between a constitutional right and a statutory privilege is not academic. It has a direct consequence in the impeachment trial now before the Philippine Senate. Because firearms ownership in the Philippines is a privilege regulated entirely by statute, the government can require public officials to disclose every registered firearm in their Statement of Assets, Liabilities, and Net Worth without any constitutional obstacle. The SALN obligation itself is grounded in two statutes: Section 7 of Republic Act No. 3019, the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act, which instructs public officers to file a true and detailed SALN, and Section 8 of Republic Act No. 6713, the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees, which requires disclosure of personal property and acquisition cost, including "all other assets such as investments, cash on hand or in banks, stocks, bonds, and the like." In the United States, a comparable disclosure requirement would enter contested constitutional territory, because the Second Amendment has been interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court as protecting an individual right to keep and bear arms, and any regulation touching that right is subject to judicial scrutiny. The Philippine legal framework presents no such barrier.

This is precisely why the prosecution could present the testimony of Police Major Joericson Sangalang regarding the 51 firearms registered to Vice President Duterte and her husband as evidence of SALN non-compliance. Sangalang testified that 22 firearms were registered to Duterte and 29 to Carpio, with a combined market value of more than P7.2 million. House prosecutor Representative Terry Ridon stated that the firearms were not listed in the Vice President's SALN from 2007 to 2025, and that "on top of not declaring cash in bank and cash on hand in her SALN from 2019 to 2025, the Vice President also failed to declare these firearms." Private prosecutor Lorna Kapunan framed the testimony as evidence of a broader pattern: "Even though they say it is only P7 million, when you submit your SALN, you are certifying under oath that it is all that you own."

The Senate received this testimony with significant skepticism. Senator Raffy Tulfo called the testimony "a waste of time." Presiding officer Francis Escudero noted that the P7.2 million in firearms would be "well within the SALN submitted of P88 million as of the latest," expressed doubts on the testimony's relevance, and pointed out that there is "no requirement for a firearm to be declared separately in the SALN." Senator Tito Sotto, who noted that he owns firearms and declares them in his SALN under "personal properties," echoed the same concern.

The legal dispute centers on whether existing SALN rules required individual firearms declaration at all. Prosecutor Bel Zamora cited Section 34 of the 2025 Omnibus Rules on the SALN, which requires the individual declaration of registered personal property, including motor vehicles, aircraft, and firearms. Defense counsel Carlo Narvasa, however, argued that the provision applies only to 2026 SALNs onwards and cannot be applied retroactively. CSC Resolution No. 1300173, issued in 2013, did not explicitly state that firearms should be specifically declared in one's SALN. House lead prosecutor Gerville Luistro acknowledged this gap but pressed the point: "If it was not particularly declared as firearms, which item did they declare these personal properties in their SALN?"

Whether or not the testimony carries the evidentiary weight the prosecution intends, the constitutional framework that permitted its presentation remains unchanged. That framework is precisely what made the prosecution's case legally possible in the Philippines, where an American prosecution on identical grounds would be far more complicated.

The Constitutional Question Before the Senate

My friends and countrymen, when we understand this constitutional history, the Duterte impeachment proceedings become clearer. We are not witnessing an overreach of government power. We are witnessing the application of a legal framework that has been in place since 1902, one that the Philippine people have reaffirmed through four constitutions and that the highest court of the land has upheld without reservation.

Remember, my friends and countrymen, the framers of every Philippine constitution chose not to include a right to bear arms. That choice has consequences, and those consequences are now being tested in the impeachment court. The prosecution has presented documented evidence of 51 firearms registered to the Vice President and her husband. The defense has argued that existing SALN rules did not require their individual declaration. The senator-judges have expressed skepticism about the testimony's weight. These are questions of evidence and statutory interpretation that the Senate must resolve. The constitutional question, however, is settled. The government of the Philippines possesses the legal authority to require full disclosure of firearms from its public officials, and every Filipino citizen has the right and the obligation to understand why.

Long live the rule of law, and long live the Republic of the Philippines!

The post EXPLAINER: Why the Philippines Has No Second Amendment and Why It Matters in the Duterte Impeachment Trial first appeared on Marcial's Law.

9/23/26

My friends and countrymen, when United States President Donald Trump announced a 19 percent tariff on Philippine goods entering America on July 22, 2025, the reaction in much of the Philippine press was predictable: alarm and the swift conclusion that America had extracted a lopsided bargain from a smaller ally with no leverage to refuse it. The Philippine Daily Inquirer cited Nomura Global Markets Research estimating the tariff would shave 0.4 percentage point off Philippine GDP growth. Rappler noted that the one-point reduction from 20 to 19 percent "meant little to experts." That reaction is understandable. It is also, on the evidence, substantially wrong; the evidence deserves a hearing before the verdict is delivered. That evidence includes the fact that the Philippine tariff rate has already fallen from a threatened 20 percent to 12.5 percent, with a legislative pathway to 10, and that Philippine exporters now face a concrete 2.5-percentage-point disadvantage against Indonesian and Malaysian competitors that domestic action by the Philippine Congress can close.

What the Headline Does Not Tell You

The 19 percent figure that dominated the news cycle is a rate applied to a fraction of Philippine exports, not to all of them. Joey Salceda, former chair of the House Committee on Ways and Means, former presidential economic adviser, and now head of the Institute for Risk and Strategic Studies, explained the arithmetic plainly at a briefing after the deal was announced: Trump's tariff threat was a threat on just 27 percent of Philippine goods, because 73 percent were already exempt in April when Philippine trade negotiators secured their inclusion in Annex II of Executive Order 14257, placing them under preferential tariff rates from existing trade agreements rather than the headline reciprocal rate. Electronics and semiconductors — the single largest category of Philippine exports to the United States, accounting for more than half of total Philippine export revenue according to the Philippine Statistics Authority — carried their own exemption. Agricultural exports worth over one billion dollars carried the same protection, including coconut oil, processed pineapples, desiccated coconuts, bananas, dried mangoes and mangosteens, frozen tuna fillets, and confectionery products, as confirmed by the Department of Trade and Industry.

Those protections expanded further still. On November 14, 2025, President Trump signed a second Executive Order expanding agricultural exemptions retroactively to November 13, with Trade Secretary Cristina Roque announcing that "the majority of our agricultural exports to the United States are now exempted from reciprocal tariffs." The Palace confirmed that more than $1 billion worth of agricultural products now enter America duty-free, accounting for nearly half of the Philippines' $14.5 billion in total exports to the United States. The direction of travel in this tariff story is not toward more burden on Filipino exporters. On the contrary, it is toward less.

Honesty requires noting that not every Filipino has felt the benefit. A December 2025 Nikkei Asia report found individual coconut farmers in Quezon province remaining downbeat, with farmer Ellizer Manza saying the exemptions would have little impact on smallholder livelihoods, and that domestic structural reform matters more than tariff relief. That critique is legitimate and separate from the tariff question; it is a structural argument about the Philippine agricultural economy, not a refutation of the exemptions themselves.

It is worth stating plainly which Philippine industries faced the full headline rate without exemption under the original IEEPA regime, and still lack protection today. The University of the Philippines Center for Integrative and Development Studies identified garments, tobacco, and footwear as among the most heavily affected, noting that approximately 31 percent of Philippine exports to the United States remain subject to the full headline rate, namely men's cotton trousers, leather shoes, knitted shirts, unprocessed tobacco, and cigarettes. Philippine trade officials have confirmed they are working to secure exemptions for garments, textiles, furniture, and automotive products in future rounds of negotiation. Workers in those industries were not protected by the exemption architecture under IEEPA, and they remain unprotected under the current Section 301 regime, though the rate they face has fallen from 19 percent to 12.5 percent. That fact deserves the same plainness as the exemptions themselves.

When those exemptions are counted against the headline rate, Salceda calculated the effective tariff rate on Philippine goods entering the United States at approximately 6.33 percent as of the July 22 deal, the second lowest rate in Asia, behind only oil-exempted Malaysia. That figure has likely fallen further since the November 14 Executive Order expanded agricultural exemptions to cover nearly half of all Philippine exports to the United States. To put that concretely: on every 56,000 pesos worth of Philippine goods shipped to the United States (approximately $1,000 at the 2025 exchange rate of roughly 56 pesos to the dollar), the effective tariff burden at 6.33 percent amounts to about 3,545 pesos rather than the 10,640 pesos the headline rate implies. That difference of more than 7,000 pesos per 56,000 pesos in exports stays in Filipino hands rather than the American treasury. The 19 percent figure that generated alarm is not the rate most Philippine exporters actually pay. It is the rate applied to the minority of Philippine goods not shielded by existing agreements and newly negotiated exemptions. This is not a small distinction. It is the difference between a damaging tariff regime and a manageable one.

The Framing That Missed the Story

Salceda was direct about the narrative problem. "This was never just a 20-to-19 tariff story," he said at the Saturday News Forum in Quezon City on July 26, 2025. "That framing is misleading. What the President did was avert a full 20 percent across-the-board tariff through early engagement and high-level negotiation." He also described the one-percentage-point reduction from 20 to 19 percent as "much ado about nothing," not because it was insignificant, but because the real story was in the exemptions secured quietly before and during President Marcos's July 22 White House visit, not in the headline rate that Trump announced for his domestic audience.

"Trump always plays to his domestic audience," Salceda said. "Plenty of deals can be made with that knowledge." This is not a criticism of American bad faith. It is a description of how trade negotiations actually work: a public announcement calibrated for one audience, and a set of technical exemptions negotiated for another. Filipino readers who consumed only the public announcement received the version designed for Americans, not the version that determines what Philippine exporters actually owe.

The most credible Filipino policy critics deserve a direct hearing. Oikonomia Advisory economist Reinielle Matt Erece acknowledged the deal was "better than nothing" while noting that "the US has the upper hand in negotiations, having obtained zero tariffs in return." UnionBank chief economist Ruben Carlo Asuncion was more measured, observing that "the one-ppt [percentage point] reduction may seem modest" but that it "translates to tens of millions in annual savings for key sectors like electronics." Neither economist called the deal a betrayal. Both called it a starting point, which is precisely what Salceda, Romualdez, and Marcos himself have said it is.

The Asymmetry That Needs Context

The deal's most frequently cited inequity is its asymmetry: Philippine exports to the United States initially faced a 19 percent tariff (now 12.5 percent under Section 301), while American goods entering the Philippines face zero tariffs. Several commentators called this a colonial-era arrangement dressed in modern trade language, and the structural complaint deserves a fair hearing rather than dismissal. It is not an equal exchange on its face.

What that framing omits, however, is where the Philippines stood before this deal. The Generalized System of Preferences, which had granted many Philippine goods zero-tariff access to the American market, lapsed in December 2020 and was never renewed under the Biden administration. The Biden administration also explicitly ruled out a bilateral free trade agreement with the Philippines in April 2023, with U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai stating it was not on the negotiating table. The Philippines entered the Trump tariff environment without a bilateral FTA, without renewed GSP access, and facing a threatened 20 percent across-the-board tariff on the 27 percent of its goods not already protected by Annex II exemptions.

Against that baseline, rather than against some imagined equal partnership that did not exist, the July 22 deal represents a net improvement, not a deterioration. The Board of Investments' Managing Head, Trade Undersecretary Ceferino Rodolfo, confirmed that the Trump administration's key officials, including U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, hold a "welcoming attitude" toward a bilateral FTA and sectoral agreement with the Philippines, a posture the Biden administration had explicitly refused to adopt. The Philippine Exporters Confederation noted that exemptions on coconuts, pineapples, bananas, and mangoes are "expected to improve demand, stabilize prices, and directly benefit exporters, farmers, and rural communities across the Philippines." PCCI President Consul Enunina V. Mangio was equally direct: "The exemptions will provide much-needed relief to exporters, help safeguard jobs, and strengthen the competitiveness of Philippine products in one of our most important markets." Executive Secretary Ralph G. Recto, speaking at a Senate hearing on November 18, was blunter still: "It's positive for us. I think President Trump realized that imposing tariffs on agriculture is inflationary, so he removed them. That's good for us."

The Door the Deal Opens

The most consequential argument in favor of this tariff arrangement is not what it contains today but what it may produce tomorrow. Salceda was unambiguous: "A Philippines-US free trade agreement is becoming increasingly possible. Being a net exporter to the US, we stand to benefit from such a deal." The Philippines exported $12.12 billion in goods to the United States in 2024, while the United States exported approximately $9.3 billion to the Philippines, meaning the Philippines runs a trade surplus with its largest export market. A full bilateral FTA, which would eliminate or substantially reduce the current 12.5 percent headline rate across all categories, would benefit the Philippines more than it would benefit the United States, precisely because the Philippines sells more to America than America sells to the Philippines. In practical terms, that means lower tariff costs for Philippine semiconductor workers, banana farmers, and coconut oil producers who depend on the American market. The headline rate, already reduced from 19 to 12.5 percent and cushioned further by exemptions, would fall to zero under a full agreement.

The Biden administration refused to open that door. The current arrangement, for all its asymmetry, has cracked it. Salceda's reading of the one-percentage-point reduction from 20 to 19 percent was precisely this: not a meaningful concession in itself, but a goodwill signal that talks can continue and that a larger agreement is within reach. Philippine Ambassador to Washington Jose Manuel Romualdez confirmed in July 2025 that "there will still be more discussions ahead," and that the 19 percent rate was "a good deal for the moment" rather than a final settlement. If those discussions stall and no FTA materializes, the Philippines will still face a 12.5 percent headline rate on approximately 31 percent of its exports to the United States. That is a worse outcome than a full agreement, but still better than the threatened 20 percent across-the-board rate the Philippines faced before Marcos's July 22 White House visit, and still cushioned by the exemptions that protect electronics and the majority of agricultural exports.

What the Electronics Exemption Actually Protects

Electronics account for approximately 53 percent of all Philippine export revenue, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority's 2024 trade report, with total earnings of $39.09 billion. Of that, $6.4 billion flowed to the United States. The Philippine electronics industry employs over 3 million workers across direct manufacturing and supporting industries, according to SEIPI, the Semiconductor and Electronics Industries in the Philippines Foundation — workers in Laguna, Cavite, Cebu, and across CALABARZON whose livelihoods depend on continued access to the American market. The electronics exemption under Annex II of Executive Order 14257 protected that access from the headline 19 percent rate. The Department of Economy, Planning, and Development estimated that the 19 percent tariff, with the electronics exemption in place, would reduce Philippine GDP by approximately 0.12 percent, or roughly $489.6 million, an impact the department described as limited to "the immediate term only" and likely to "turn positive over the medium term" as trade adjustments are made.

The Philippine government's own economic planners, in other words, regard the tariff's GDP impact as modest and temporary, not structural or permanent. Nomura Global Markets Research estimated a larger 0.4 percentage point GDP impact in July, before the electronics exemption was fully confirmed and before the November 14 Executive Order expanded agricultural exemptions further, which accounts for the difference between the two figures.

What Changed in 2026: The Legal Ground Shifted, the Direction Did Not

The tariff architecture described above no longer exists in the form it took in 2025. On February 20, 2026, the United States Supreme Court struck down all tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in a 6-3 decision authored by Chief Justice Roberts (Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump), holding that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs and that the power to do so is reserved to Congress under Article I of the Constitution. All IEEPA tariffs, including the 19 percent reciprocal tariff on the Philippines, terminated at 12:00 AM on February 24, 2026. The Palace confirmed that the majority of Philippine exports "already enjoyed zero tariff in the US even before this decision," a statement consistent with the exemption architecture this essay has documented.

A Filipino reader inclined to view this ruling as evidence that America imposed unlawful tariffs on Philippine goods for seven months should consider what the ruling actually demonstrates. The American judiciary overrode its own President's trade policy on constitutional grounds. No comparable institution exists in China, Russia, or any other major trading partner in the Pacific. The Supreme Court did not act on behalf of the Philippines; it acted on behalf of American importers who challenged the tariffs in court. The result, however, was the same: an American institution, operating under the rule of law, struck down the very tariffs that Philippine critics called exploitative. That is not the behavior of a predatory power. It is the behavior of a constitutional republic whose internal checks function even when they are politically inconvenient for the sitting President.

On the same day the Supreme Court ruled, President Trump invoked Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose a temporary 10 percent global tariff on all trading partners, including the Philippines. Section 122 tariffs are capped at 150 days and require Congressional approval for extension. This was a stopgap, not a strategy.

When the Section 122 tariffs expired on July 23, 2026, the Trump administration replaced them with permanent tariffs under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, citing the failure of 60 trading partners to prohibit or effectively enforce bans on the importation of goods produced with forced labor. The Philippines was placed in the higher tier at 12.5 percent rather than 10 percent, because the USTR determined that the Philippines lacks a specific statutory prohibition on forced labor imports. The Department of Foreign Affairs rejected this characterization, with spokesperson Analyn Ratonel stating that "the Philippines has long demonstrated that its locally produced goods, including those exported to the US, do not rely on forced labor." Ambassador Romualdez confirmed that negotiations continue: "We can still negotiate," he told Rappler on July 25, 2026.

It is important to understand what the forced labor finding is and what it is not. It is not an accusation that Filipino workers are enslaved or that Philippine-made goods are produced through coercion. It is a procedural determination that the Philippines lacks a specific statutory import ban on goods produced with forced labor elsewhere, particularly goods transshipped from countries with well-documented forced labor practices, including China and Myanmar. The distinction matters because the fix is legislative, not moral. Cambodia, India, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Honduras, and Trinidad and Tobago each enacted forced labor import bans between June and July 2026 and were moved to the lower 10 percent tier as a result. These are not countries with stronger labor records than the Philippines; they are countries that passed a specific law faster than the Philippines did. Salceda has already responded by pushing House Bill legislation to enact a comparable Philippine prohibition. "Of course, we want to protect Philippine exporters, Filipino jobs, and our competitiveness in the U.S. market," he said. "A 12.5-percent additional tariff has real consequences for our industries." The legislation, if passed, would give the Philippines a clear basis to request reclassification to the 10 percent tier, reducing the headline rate by a further 2.5 percentage points through a one-paragraph domestic statute rather than through negotiation with Washington. The forced labor characterization is a problem the Philippine Congress can solve on its own, and Salceda is already telling them to solve it.

The executive branch has not waited for Congress. On August 6, 2026, Palace press officer Claire Castro confirmed that the DTI, DOLE, and DOF have issued a Joint Administrative Order establishing a mechanism for investigating and blocking goods produced with forced labor, and that the government's explicit target is to bring the Philippine rate from 12.5 to 10 percent. "We have many laws proving that forced labor is prohibited," Castro said. "There are penalties for employers who are caught imposing forced labor."

The urgency is not abstract. Indonesia and Malaysia both received the 10 percent rate, as confirmed by the Dateline Philippines on August 8, 2026, leaving Philippine goods at a 2.5-percentage-point disadvantage against direct ASEAN competitors for the same American buyers. Every month the Philippines remains in the higher tier is a month its garment, footwear, and tobacco exporters lose ground to neighbors who moved faster.

Philexport President Sergio Ortiz-Luis Jr. was more cautious, noting that with exemptions under the new regime still unclear, Philippine exporters are "likely to hold back on production and defer orders until there is greater clarity." That caution is warranted, and exporters waiting for clarity have every reason to be careful. As of September 18, 2026, DTI Undersecretary Gepty confirmed to Context.ph that the Philippines is pursuing the tariff reduction on a bilateral track with Washington, separate from broader ASEAN-US discussions, and that negotiations remain active. Three facts, however, deserve equal weight. First, the headline rate the Philippines now faces is 12.5 percent, not 19 percent; the direction of travel since the July 2025 deal has been downward, not upward. Second, electronics, semiconductors, computers, tropical agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and critical minerals are among approximately 2,120 product-level exemptions under Part A of the Section 301 regime, meaning the exemptions that shielded the Philippines' most important export categories under IEEPA have substantially survived the legal transition under a different statutory authority. Third, the path from 12.5 percent to 10 percent is explicitly open through domestic legislation that is already before the Philippine House of Representatives. A headline rate that started at a threatened 20 percent, was negotiated to 19, was struck down entirely by the Supreme Court, was temporarily replaced at 10 percent, and now stands at 12.5 percent with a legislative pathway to 10, is not the trajectory of a nation being exploited. It is the trajectory of a negotiation still in progress, between allies who have every reason to keep talking.

The Verdict

My friends and countrymen, the case against the tariff arrangement that began this story rested on the headline figure of 19 percent. That figure no longer applies. The current headline rate is 12.5 percent under Section 301, with electronics, semiconductors, tropical agriculture, and over two thousand additional product categories exempted. The case for a measured assessment rests on the effective rate of 6.33 percent as of the July 2025 deal (a figure that has since fallen further), the survival of the exemption architecture through a Supreme Court ruling and two changes of legal authority, the opening of a path toward a full bilateral FTA that the previous American administration refused to walk, a clear legislative pathway from 12.5 percent to 10 percent through domestic action, and the Philippine government's own finding that the GDP impact is small and short-term. None of this means the arrangement is ideal. The Philippine government itself disputes the forced labor characterization, and the 12.5 percent rate remains higher than the near-zero access the Philippines enjoyed under GSP before 2020. Further negotiation is both necessary and possible. Philippine and American negotiators owe that effort most urgently to the garment, footwear, and tobacco workers whose industries remain subject to the full headline rate, and most visibly to the more than 3 million electronics workers whose access to the American market this deal has already shielded.

A commentator who tells you only that America has imposed tariffs on Philippine goods, without naming the exemptions, the effective rate, the downward trajectory from 20 to 19 to 12.5 percent, and the legislative pathway to 10, is telling you the version designed for an American domestic audience. The version designed for an informed Filipino reader includes all of it. It includes the words of Joey Salceda, who concluded in July 2025 that the finer details of the Marcos-Trump negotiation "will benefit the Philippines in the long run," and who responded to the 2026 developments not with retreat but with legislation to bring the Philippines into the lower tariff tier. That is not the conclusion of a man who was deceived, nor of a man who was uncritical; it is the conclusion of a man who called the headline reduction "much ado about nothing" and still read the fine print and found the deal worth taking, a conclusion, moreover, that Roque, Recto, Mangio, and Romualdez have each reached independently from their own vantage points.

For those who wish to act rather than wait, the path is clear: Philippine exporters should verify whether their specific products fall under the Part A exemptions of the Section 301 regime. Filipino citizens should urge their Congressional representatives to pass Salceda's forced labor import ban legislation, which is the single fastest route from 12.5 to 10 percent. Philippine trade associations should continue engaging with the DTI's bilateral submissions to Washington. The tariff story is not over. It is being written, and Filipinos who read the fine print can help write the next chapter.

Long live the prosperity of the Philippines, and long live our alliance with America!

The post From 20 to 12.5: What Trump's Tariffs Actually Mean for Filipinos first appeared on Marcial's Law.

9/17/26

Updated:

9/30/26

My friends and countrymen, on September 23, 2026, the Senate impeachment court voted thirteen to one to lower the conviction threshold in the trial of Vice President Sara Duterte. The fixed requirement of sixteen votes, which Presiding Officer Francis Escudero had established on the opening day of trial, was overturned. The court ruled that the two-thirds requirement for conviction applies only to those senator-judges who are legally qualified to participate in the proceedings, not to the full twenty-four seats of the chamber. That vote followed a week of deliberation in which four retired Supreme Court justices appeared before the court as amici curiae, or "friends of the court," to advise on the constitutional question. This essay explains why the Senate ruled correctly, what constitutional principles compelled that result, and why every Filipino voter should understand what was at stake. I have written separately about the substantive case against the Vice President in The Case for the Conviction of Vice President Sara Duterte.

The Two Interpretations

Two interpretations of the Constitution are now before the Senate impeachment court, and the distinction between them rests on a question as old as legal reasoning itself: Does one follow the literal words of the law, or the reason behind them? The first is the literal or fixed interpretation, grounded in the principle of verba legis, which holds that when the text of the law is clear, it must be applied as written without interpretation. Article XI, Section 3(6) requires the concurrence of two-thirds of all the members of the Senate, and "all the members" means the full twenty-four seats regardless of who occupies them, who is present, or who is legally capable of participating. Under this reading, sixteen votes are required for conviction under all circumstances. The second is the contextual or functional interpretation, grounded in the principle of ratio legis est anima, which holds that the reason of the law is its soul. The phrase "two-thirds of all the members" must be read alongside other constitutional provisions and practical realities, and the denominator must reflect the number of senators who are qualified and able to discharge their duties as judges, not the number of seats that nominally exist. Under this reading, the threshold adjusts to reflect the actual composition of the court. The question is whether the Senate impeachment court will follow the dead letter or the living purpose of the Constitution.

The American Precedent

Filipino voters who find this debate unfamiliar should consider how our own Constitution was modeled. Article I, Section 3 of the United States Constitution provides that "no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present." The critical word is "present." The American framers understood that a conviction threshold must account for the real composition of the body sitting in judgment, not an abstract number on a roster. The Philippine Constitution of 1987 uses the phrase "all the Members of the Senate" rather than "Members present," and it is precisely this difference in language that has produced the current dispute. However, three former chief justices of our Supreme Court have now concluded that the Philippine phrase, properly interpreted, does not require the rigid result that its critics claim. Indeed, Davide, who helped write the 1987 provision, testified that the Philippine framers intended the same functional result that the American framers achieved with the word "present": a senator who cannot participate in the trial cannot be counted toward the threshold for conviction.

What the Framers Said

Former Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr., a framer of the 1987 Constitution, submitted a memorandum stating that the basis of computing the two-thirds must be the number of senators who are qualified to vote, "not the 24 in the present Senate." Davide specified that the framers of the 1935, 1973, and 1987 Constitutions could never have intended to include in the phrase "all the Members of the Senate" those who are outside the jurisdiction of the Philippines, whose whereabouts are unknown, who are in hiding to avoid arrest, or who suffer from legal impediments or restraints that render them incapable of exercising their duties. Davide's position is not without precedent in Philippine jurisprudence. In Avelino v. Cuenco (83 Phil. 17, 1949), the Supreme Court treated the Senate's effective membership as twenty-three instead of twenty-four because Senator Tomas Confesor was in the United States and beyond the Senate's ability to compel attendance, and Senator Vicente Sotto was confined on medical leave. The Court ruled that twelve senators constituted a valid majority of twenty-three. Although Davide himself noted that the Avelino case is "not directly applicable in impeachment cases" because it concerned quorum for ordinary legislative business, he concluded that by analogy it provides guiding light for the present question. The principle is the same: a senator who cannot be compelled to participate cannot be counted as though he had participated.

Christian Monsod, a fellow member of the 1986 Constitutional Commission who chaired the Committee on Accountability of Public Officers that drafted the impeachment provisions of the 1987 Charter, confirmed the Senate's ruling in interviews with One News and dzBB radio on September 23 through 25. As Monsod stated plainly, "The denominator can be changed." Referring to Senators Estrada and Marcoleta, Monsod said, "They are only senators in name and not in substance." He further noted that Republic Act 7080, the Anti-Plunder Act, explicitly mandates that government officials charged with plunder shall be suspended from exercising the functions of their office, and that a fugitive from justice should likewise be excluded from the denominator "because once he is arrested, he is already prevented from exercising his power." When asked about Senator Alan Peter Cayetano's argument that the threshold should remain fixed at sixteen, Monsod replied: "He's wrong." Of Senator Camille Villar's emotional defense of her detained colleagues, Monsod said: "She does not understand the law." Monsod also affirmed that the framers did not anticipate the present situation, in which multiple senator-judges would be simultaneously incapacitated by detention, flight from justice, or prolonged medical absence. The failure to anticipate such a scenario does not mean the Constitution prohibits the Senate from addressing it. It means the Senate must exercise the interpretive authority that the Constitution grants it.

Rene Sarmiento, another member of the 1986 Constitutional Commission, stated in interviews with DZMM on September 11 and Bilyonaryo News Channel on September 16 that the framers built the impeachment court on the assumption that every senator seated as a judge would be, in his words, "present, active, functioning and participative." The drafters, Sarmiento acknowledged, "simply never pictured senator-judges who might be behind bars or evading arrest." That gap between the framers' assumption and the present reality is the origin of the dispute. Sarmiento's conclusion was direct: "Those beyond the coercive powers of the state, they should be excluded in the voting." He cited the American impeachment proceedings, in which only senators present at the trial cast the vote, and referenced Avelino v. Cuenco as a persuasive guide. Sarmiento also clarified where the authority to resolve the question resides, stating that the threshold is not for the presiding officer alone to determine: "It's not the presiding officer, who's Senator Escudero." It is for the Senate impeachment court as a whole.

What the Former Chief Justices Said

Former Chief Justice Reynato Puno rejected a standalone literal reading of Article XI, Section 3(6). He observed that if the framers had intended a fixed number, they would have written "sixteen" rather than employing a fraction. As Puno stated, "By using two-thirds, the number of votes to convict will have to move depending on certain factors," including which senators are legally and physically capable of participating. Puno further cautioned that wrongfully excluding a senator-judge from participating could expose the entire proceeding and any eventual verdict to Supreme Court review and possible nullification. This caution deserves honest acknowledgment, for it cuts in both directions. If the Senate wrongfully excludes a senator-judge who should have been counted, a conviction could be voided. If the Senate wrongfully includes a senator-judge who should have been excluded, an acquittal could be challenged on the same grounds. The solution is not to avoid the question but to answer it correctly, which is precisely why Puno advocated for what he called a "contextual and functional interpretation of the Constitution" rather than a mechanical recitation of the number twenty-four.

Former Chief Justice Artemio Panganiban described the impeachment trial as sui generis, a Latin term meaning "of its own kind," possessing both legal and political character. He questioned whether it would be fair to allow senators who are traveling abroad or hiding "in the dark corners of the world" to participate in the final vote when others have spent their time hearing arguments and examining evidence. He urged senators who have failed to actively participate to consider inhibiting themselves from the proceedings. Panganiban also stressed that the threshold question is not for the Supreme Court to decide. It is for the Senate itself, as the sole judge of impeachment cases, to resolve. That distinction matters. The Senate is not waiting for permission. It is exercising a power that the Constitution exclusively confers upon it.

Retired Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, though not among the four amici curiae who appeared on September 16, has independently and consistently argued the same position since before the trial began. Carpio maintained that the phrase "all members of the Senate" refers only to those who remain qualified to perform the functions of a senator, and he applied that principle to three specific cases: Senators Rodante Marcoleta and Jinggoy Estrada, both detained on separate plunder charges, and Senator Ronald dela Rosa, who never took the oath as a senator-judge. As Carpio stated plainly, "If you cannot hold office, you cannot vote." Under his computation, only twenty-one senators are presently qualified to be counted, which would reduce the two-thirds threshold to fourteen votes. The arithmetic is not arbitrary. It follows directly from the constitutional principle that membership requires the capacity to serve. Hence, the constitutional standard of two-thirds does not change. The fraction remains identical. Only the number of qualified members to whom the fraction applies changes.

The Lone Dissent

The lone dissenter among the amici curiae was retired Associate Justice Adolfo Azcuna, who served as vice chair of the same Committee on Accountability of Public Officers that Monsod chaired. Azcuna insisted that "all means all" and that the constitutionally mandated two-thirds vote must be computed on the basis of all twenty-four senators without exception. He argued that a threshold must be fixed and determinable from the start, not subject to adjustment depending on how many senators are present on any given day. Azcuna illustrated the concern with arithmetic: if only twenty senators were counted, two-thirds would amount to roughly thirteen or fourteen votes, substantially below sixteen. He concluded that such a reduction would undermine the very nature of a supermajority requirement. Presiding Officer Francis Escudero, in his July 6 ruling, adopted the same position, citing the Supreme Court's ruling in Bayan v. Zamora (2000), which held that despite only twenty-three incumbent senators at the time, the constitutional requirement still meant at least sixteen affirmative votes. However, Bayan v. Zamora concerned a vacant seat, not senators who are detained, in hiding, or legally incapacitated. A vacancy means no occupant exists. The present situation is fundamentally different: the occupants exist but cannot serve, which is the precise category that Davide, Puno, and Panganiban addressed in their opinions. It should also be noted that during the impeachment trial of President Joseph Estrada in 2000, there were only twenty-two sitting senators, and confusion arose among lawmakers over whether fifteen or sixteen votes were needed for conviction. Davide himself served as presiding officer of that trial, which ended not in a conviction vote but in a walkout by the prosecution and mass public protest that forced Estrada from office. The threshold question was never formally answered. It has been deferred, not resolved.

The defense has also invoked the 2012 impeachment trial of former Chief Justice Renato Corona. At the time of the Corona trial, only twenty-three senators sat because one seat was vacant after Benigno Aquino III won the presidency. The Senate applied the sixteen-vote threshold despite having only twenty-three members, and Corona was convicted twenty to three. Defense counsel Michael Poa cited this precedent to argue that the Senate has never lowered the threshold, even with fewer than twenty-four members. The argument fails on the same distinction. In 2012, the twenty-fourth seat was vacant. No occupant existed, and no senator was being counted in the denominator while simultaneously being unable to serve. The Corona precedent, properly understood, supports the contextual interpretation rather than the textual one. The Senate kept the threshold at sixteen in 2012 because all twenty-three sitting senators were qualified to participate. Had any of them been detained or in hiding, the question now before the court would have arisen then.

Why the Fixed Threshold Fails

Justice Azcuna's position, while internally consistent, does not withstand scrutiny against the realities of the present Senate. Several senator-judges cannot regularly attend the proceedings: Senators Jinggoy Estrada and Rodante Marcoleta are detained on separate plunder charges, Senator Ronald dela Rosa has evaded public life amid an active International Criminal Court arrest warrant and never took the oath as a senator-judge, and Senator Loren Legarda is on extended medical leave abroad with no confirmed date of return. To count those absent or legally incapacitated senators in the denominator is to grant them a de facto vote against conviction without their ever hearing a single witness, examining a single document, or deliberating upon a single article of impeachment. The Constitution does not confer that power upon an empty chair. A fixed threshold of sixteen under such circumstances does not protect the integrity of the supermajority requirement. Quite to the contrary, it weaponizes absenteeism. Any faction seeking to shield an impeached official from conviction need only ensure that enough allied senators remain absent, detained, or beyond the jurisdiction of the Senate to make sixteen votes arithmetically impossible. The events of September 23 confirmed this danger in practice: six senator-judges from the minority bloc refused to cast a vote on the threshold question itself, and four others have been absent from the trial for months, meaning that ten of twenty-four senators have now declined or been unable to exercise their constitutional function as judges in this proceeding. That is not constitutional governance. That is constitutional sabotage.

The Defense Responds

Vice President Duterte's spokesperson, Salvador Paolo Panelo Jr., warned that lowering the sixteen-vote threshold could invite the sitting government to target senators expected to vote against its preferred outcome. This argument sounds reasonable in the abstract but collapses upon contact with the facts. The question before the impeachment court is not whether the government may target senators. The question is whether senators who are unable or unwilling to perform their constitutional duty as judges should nevertheless be counted as though they had performed it. If Panelo's concern is political interference, the remedy is to protect each senator-judge's independence, not to count non-participating senators in the denominator so that conviction becomes structurally impossible.

Defense counsel Michael Poa, in his oral arguments on September 23, raised a broader constitutional objection: lowering the denominator in the impeachment threshold would carry consequences for other constitutional provisions that also require a two-thirds Senate vote, including the extension or revocation of martial law, the expulsion of a senator, and the amendment of the Constitution itself. The concern is legitimate in principle. In practice, the impeachment court addressed it directly. Presiding Officer Escudero ruled that the court's decision applies pro hac vice, meaning only to this impeachment proceeding, and will not bind future impeachment courts or other Senate functions. The threshold was adjusted for this trial because the specific conditions of this trial, detained, absent, and fugitive senator-judges, required it. That is not a precedent that rewrites the Constitution. It is a ruling that applies the Constitution to the facts before the court.

Senator Imee Marcos, one of the six senator-judges who refused to vote on the threshold question, stated the opposition's constitutional argument in its most forceful form: "Dapat natin bilangin ang mga boto ayon sa Saligang Batas, hindi natin dapat baguhin ang Saligang Batas ayon sa mga boto. Kabuktutan ito, kabaligtaran." The translation: "We should count the votes according to the Constitution, not change the Constitution according to the votes. This is corruption, this is inversion." The accusation is serious, and it deserves a direct answer. The contextual interpretation does not change the Constitution. It does not alter the two-thirds requirement. It corrects the denominator to which that requirement applies, based not on legislative amendment but on the factual reality that certain senators cannot discharge their constitutional function. Thus, the Constitution was not rewritten on September 23; the denominator was simply corrected.

House Prosecutor Representative Chel Diokno, in his oral arguments before the Senate impeachment court on September 23, 2026, stated the consequence plainly: a fixed denominator of twenty-four, applied to a Senate in which four members cannot participate, would amount to "an acquittal by default." As Diokno told the court, "Yes, the Constitution deliberately makes conviction harder by imposing the two-thirds requirement. But making it harder is not the same as making it depend on senators who are not judges, or who are incapable of acting as judges." Diokno further dismantled the premise that adjusting the denominator favors the prosecution. Excluding non-participating senators from the computation reduces the number of votes required on both sides. The threshold for conviction decreases, but so does the threshold for acquittal. The fraction remains two-thirds. The constitutional standard does not change. What changes is the number of qualified members to whom the standard applies. As Diokno stated, "The articles do not change. The burden, imposed upon the prosecution, does not change. In the same breath, the responsibility of this Court to render independent judgment remains the same. Whatever the Court decides, the prosecution will respect that decision. Because ultimately, two-thirds remains two-thirds."

Former Senator and delegate of the 1971 Constitutional Convention Richard Gordon has articulated a position that exposes the deeper problem with the defense's posture. As Gordon himself declared, "Hindi itinatakda ng Konstitusyon ang 16 na boto para sa paghatol sa impeachment," which translates to: the Constitution does not fix sixteen votes for conviction in impeachment. Gordon has also described Vice President Duterte as an official who behaves as though she is owed her standing in public life, yet the impeachment clause exists precisely to hold powerful officials to account. A conviction threshold that becomes unreachable due to the voluntary or involuntary absence of allied senators does not preserve the constitutional order. On the contrary, it dismantles it.

The contextual interpretation is the correct one, for four reasons. First, it reflects the stated intent of the framers of the Constitution themselves. Four members of the 1986 Constitutional Commission have spoken publicly on this question: Davide, Monsod, Sarmiento, and Azcuna. Of the three who support the contextual interpretation, Davide authored the memorandum, Monsod chaired the committee that produced the impeachment clause, and Sarmiento acknowledged the gap between the framers' assumptions and the present reality and reached the same conclusion. Azcuna alone dissented. Davide did not speculate about what the framers might have intended. He told the Senate what they indubitably intended, because he was among those who wrote the provision. Monsod confirmed it. Sarmiento corroborated it. Second, it prevents the absurdity that Panganiban identified. If five senators were to die and three were to resign, leaving only sixteen members, the literal interpretation would require all sixteen remaining senators to vote for conviction, a unanimity requirement that no constitution in the world imposes for impeachment. Third, it prevents the manipulation that Puno warned against. A wrongful exclusion or a wrongful inclusion of a senator-judge in the count could expose the entire proceeding to Supreme Court nullification. The contextual interpretation, applied honestly, addresses that risk by requiring the Senate to determine the composition of its court based on legal qualification rather than political convenience. Fourth, it produces a concrete and defensible result when applied to the present Senate. Carpio has done the arithmetic, and it holds. That is not a weakening of the supermajority requirement. Indeed, it is the honest application of the supermajority requirement to the Senate as it actually exists.

The Senate impeachment court is not a legislature counting heads for a quorum. It is a constitutional tribunal sitting in judgment of the second highest official of the Republic. Its members must have heard the evidence, examined the witnesses, and deliberated upon the articles before casting their votes. To count senators who have done none of those things in the denominator is to make a mockery of the trial itself.

The Senate Votes

On September 23, 2026, the twenty-ninth day of trial, the Senate impeachment court voted on the question. Thirteen senator-judges voted to overturn Presiding Officer Escudero's July 6 ruling and to set the conviction threshold at two-thirds of those who are legally qualified to participate in the proceedings. Escudero cast the lone dissenting vote. Six senator-judges refused to vote at all: Senate Minority Leader Alan Peter Cayetano, Pia Cayetano, Imee Marcos, Bong Go, Camille Villar, and Robinhood Padilla. Before the threshold vote itself, the court had rejected Cayetano's motion to defer the issue and refer it to the Supreme Court, by the same margin of thirteen to six. Cayetano warned that changing the denominator could produce the equivalent of a "mistrial." The court was not persuaded.

Escudero's response to the vote deserves to be recorded in full, because it is the statement of an officer who disagrees with a ruling and nevertheless submits to the authority of the body he serves: "For the record, while the chair takes exception to this decision, the chair nonetheless accepts it as a judgment of this court and is bound to give it effect." That is the conduct of a presiding officer who understands that the sole power to try and decide impeachment cases belongs to the Senate as a whole, not to the chair alone.

The defense has indicated that an appeal to the Supreme Court remains a possibility. Diokno has responded that such a challenge would not be justiciable until after the Senate renders an actual verdict. Until then, the impeachment court's ruling stands.

My friends and countrymen, the Senate has answered the constitutional question that has hung over this trial since its opening day. It has determined, by an overwhelming margin, that a senator who cannot serve as a judge cannot be counted as though he had. The empty chairs will not cast votes. The three constitutional framers, three former chief justices, and Justice Carpio showed the way, and thirteen senator-judges followed. What remains is the trial itself, the evidence, the deliberation, and the verdict. We, the citizens who entrusted our sovereignty to these institutions, must now hold every senator-judge accountable not merely for the threshold vote that has passed, but for the conviction vote that is yet to come.

Long live the rule of law, and long live the Republic of the Philippines!

The post The Empty Chairs That Nearly Acquitted Sara Duterte first appeared on Marcial's Law.

9/16/26

My friends and countrymen, the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte has been underway since July 6, 2026, and before a single article of impeachment has been decided on its merits, the Senate impeachment court has been forced to confront a question that may determine the outcome of the entire proceeding: how many senator-judges must vote "guilty" in order to convict?

The answer appears straightforward. Article XI, Section 3, Paragraph 6 of the 1987 Philippine Constitution states that no person shall be convicted "without the concurrence of two-thirds of all the Members of the Senate." The Senate is composed of 24 members. Two-thirds of 24 is 16. On the opening day of the trial, Presiding Officer Senator Francis Escudero ruled accordingly: 16 votes are required for conviction, and no senator-judge challenged or appealed that ruling at the time.

The matter did not remain settled for long. As the trial progressed, four senator-judges became unable or unwilling to participate. Senator Jinggoy Estrada was arrested and detained on plunder charges. Senator Rodante Marcoleta was likewise arrested on separate plunder charges. Senator Ronald "Bato" dela Rosa has been in hiding since May, evading an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for his alleged role in former President Rodrigo Duterte's drug war. Senator Loren Legarda has been absent on medical leave since August 3, with the Office of the Ombudsman announcing a preliminary investigation against her for graft and plunder over alleged anomalous solar projects.

With four of 24 senator-judges effectively absent, the question became unavoidable: should the conviction threshold remain at 16, or should it be recalculated to reflect only those senators who are legally qualified and physically able to participate?

On September 8, 2026, Senator Erwin Tulfo formally appealed Escudero's July 6 ruling, asking the impeachment court to revisit the threshold. Tulfo maintained that his appeal was not intended to lower the bar for conviction, but to clarify whether senators who cannot participate should continue to be counted among "all the Members of the Senate" as the Constitution uses that phrase.

The impeachment court has invited four retired Supreme Court justices as amici curiae, or "friends of the court," to advise on the matter. Three of them are scheduled to appear physically before the court on September 16: retired Chief Justices Artemio Panganiban and Reynato Puno, and retired Associate Justice Adolfo Azcuna. Retired Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr., who presided over the impeachment trial of former President Joseph Estrada in 2000, will submit a legal memorandum rather than appearing in person. Notably, both Davide and Azcuna were framers of the 1987 Constitution. The prosecution and defense will present oral arguments on September 23, after which the senator-judges are expected to vote.

What follows is a presentation of the competing positions, sourced from the officials and legal authorities who have stated them publicly.

Those Who Argue the Threshold Must Remain at 16

The textualist position holds that the Constitution means precisely what it says. "All the Members of the Senate" refers to the total composition of the chamber, which is 24. Two-thirds of 24 is 16. The threshold does not move.

Presiding Officer Francis Escudero established this reading on July 6, 2026, when he ruled that conviction requires at least 16 affirmative votes based on a literal interpretation of the constitutional provision. He has since invited the amici curiae to weigh in, but his original ruling stands unless overturned by the senator-judges.

Senator Alan Peter Cayetano affirmed the 16-vote requirement on July 7, stating that the court had effectively settled the matter when no senator-judge objected on the first day. Cayetano further argued that senators who are unable to vote would effectively be counted in favor of acquittal, a consequence he suggested might be more favorable to the defense than a reduced threshold.

Acting Senate President Win Gatchalian declared on June 10 that the threshold would remain at 16 "regardless of how many senators attend the trial, which bloc controls the chamber, or who presides over the impeachment court."

The Vice President's camp has publicly agreed with Escudero's ruling, maintaining that the two-thirds requirement refers to the total number of seats in the chamber.

Representative Paolo Duterte, the Vice President's brother, argued on social media that 10 votes cannot amend a constitutional requirement, writing that a bare majority tally "has no bearing on the Constitution."

Senator Pia Cayetano cautioned against treating selective interpretations of Supreme Court decisions as though they were established jurisprudence or Senate rules.

Senator Robin Padilla insisted that constitutional provisions cannot be altered arbitrarily and must undergo standard amendment procedures through proper legislative committees.

Impeachment court spokesman Reginald Tongol, in a separate statement from his procedural clarifications, warned that lowering the constitutionally cited 16-vote requirement would set a "dangerous precedent" and that the court "cannot bend established legal standards for the convenience of any party."

Those Who Argue the Threshold May Be Adjusted

The functional position holds that "all the Members of the Senate" should be understood to mean all members who are legally qualified to exercise the functions of a senator, not those who have been removed from participation by suspension, detention, or flight from the law. Under this reading, the two-thirds calculation changes when the number of qualified members changes.

Retired Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonio Carpio has been the most prominent voice for this position. Carpio's view evolved over the course of the proceedings. In April 2026, he stated that conviction requires 16 affirmative votes regardless of absences, and that senators who do not participate effectively count against conviction because the threshold is fixed. By June 2026, Carpio revised his position, arguing that the threshold is not fixed and will depend on the total number of active senators when the court convenes, because the constitutional computation should include only those legally qualified to participate. Specifically, Carpio argued that suspended Senator Jinggoy Estrada should be excluded from the count, citing Supreme Court rulings and provisions of the Plunder Law. He also maintained that only senators who took their oath should sit as judges, which he said would not include Senator Ronald dela Rosa, who has not resurfaced since slipping out of custody in May 2026.

Retired Associate Justice Adolfo Azcuna, who was one of the framers of the 1987 Constitution, raised a separate basis for reducing the count. Azcuna suggested that dela Rosa could be excluded from the computation if judged a fugitive, arguing that being a fugitive amounts to what he called "constructive resignation." In his words: "Being a fugitive entails running away from the legal system. If one runs away from the legal system, he relinquishes all membership in that system." Under this reasoning, the conviction threshold could drop to 15.

Retired Chief Justice Artemio Panganiban wrote in his Philippine Daily Inquirer column that Escudero's 16-vote ruling is "not set in stone." He described the ruling as "merely interlocutory," meaning the impeachment court can reverse or modify it at the proper time. Panganiban added that such reversal or modification "requires only a simple majority, not two-thirds."

University of the Philippines College of Law Associate Dean and constitutional law professor Paolo Tamase initially held the traditional view, stating in June 2026 that "all the members" requires an absolute two-thirds majority and that conviction remains possible as long as at least 16 senators are available. He subsequently told Rappler that he found Carpio's argument persuasive, noting that the conventional reading "opens the possibility to some Senate functions being incapable of being fulfilled" if the number of functional members drops below the thresholds the Constitution requires. Tamase acknowledged these are "unprecedented times" and concluded that the emerging view "seems persuasive if we intend a functional Senate and functional constitutional processes."

Former Integrated Bar of the Philippines president Domingo Cayosa argued that lowering the threshold to match the number of participating senator-judges would be the "fair and practical" reading of the 1987 Constitution, consistent with its spirit of keeping institutions operative and effective.

Lead Public Prosecutor Representative Gerville Luistro was among the first officials to express support for potentially reducing the required votes to between 14 and 15.

The Procedural Mechanics

Impeachment court spokesman Tongol clarified on September 13 that the court will need 11 votes from the active roster of 20 senator-judges to overturn Escudero's ruling. This corrected his earlier statement that only 10 votes were needed, an error that was carried in national headlines. The correction accounts for the fact that Presiding Officer Escudero is now expected to vote on the threshold question, bringing the active roster to 20 rather than 19. Tongol also explained on September 14 that the court may have to vote twice: first on whether to overturn Escudero's existing ruling, and then, if that vote succeeds, on what the new threshold should be. If the vote to overturn results in a tie, the motion fails and Escudero's 16-vote ruling stands.

The Voices Urging Procedural Integrity

Former Senator Richard Gordon has warned publicly against efforts to block or frustrate the impeachment trial, positioning himself as a voice for procedural legitimacy rather than advocating for a specific threshold number. His commentary has focused on the Senate's constitutional duty to conduct the trial itself.

Former Senate President Franklin Drilon has emphasized that impeachment is a political process, not a criminal case, and that conviction requires a two-thirds vote based on the senators' conscience. "Not all senators are lawyers," Drilon has noted. "Therefore, they cannot act as judges in determining whether there is proof beyond reasonable doubt. What matters is what is in their conscience, and that is what will prevail."

House prosecution spokesman Representative Zia Alonto Adiong has stressed that the two-thirds rule itself is fixed, but that the translation of that rule into an actual number of votes is a matter for the impeachment court to decide. He stated that the prosecution "does not want its case to be driven by vote counting."

The Historical Precedent: The Estrada Trial

This is not the first time the conviction threshold has been debated in the Philippines. During the impeachment trial of former President Joseph Estrada in 2000, news archives indicate that there was initial confusion among lawmakers on whether 15 or 16 votes were needed for removal, as there were only 22 sitting senators at the time. The trial, presided over by Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr., did not reach a verdict; it was aborted when the senator-judges voted 11 to 10 against opening a sealed envelope containing critical bank records, triggering the public outrage that led to the Second EDSA Revolution.

The unresolved arithmetic of the Estrada trial now returns to the same chamber, with the same constitutional text, and with Davide himself being asked to advise on the very question his predecessors never formally settled.

The American Parallel: "Members Present" vs. "All the Members"

The Philippine Constitution was largely modeled after the Constitution of the United States, and the impeachment clauses of both nations are structurally identical in design, with one critical divergence in the language governing the conviction threshold.

The American text, under Article I, Section 3, Clause 6, reads: "No Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present."

The Philippine text, under Article XI, Section 3, Paragraph 6, reads: "No person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two-thirds of all the Members of the Senate."

The American framers chose "Members present." The Philippine framers chose "all the Members." That single substitution is the origin of the entire dispute now before the Senate impeachment court.

Under the American system, the two-thirds threshold operates on a sliding scale. If some senators are absent, recused, or the chamber has vacancies, the number needed for conviction adjusts accordingly. The only fixed requirement is that a quorum must be present, which the U.S. Constitution sets at a majority of the chamber, or 51 senators. In theory, a conviction in the United States would count as constitutionally valid with as few as 34 affirmative votes, provided the minimum quorum of 51 senators participated.

This was precisely how the threshold was applied in the first impeachment trial of an American president. In 1868, when the United States Senate tried President Andrew Johnson on eleven articles of impeachment, 54 senators voted on the articles. The result was 35 guilty and 19 not guilty. The tally fell one vote short of the two-thirds of those present required for conviction. No constitutional dispute arose over whether absent senators should have been counted in the denominator, because the American text explicitly limits the calculation to those present.

The Philippine framers studied the American original when they drafted the 1987 Constitution. The parallel structure of the two impeachment clauses confirms this. Both documents name a presiding officer for exactly one scenario (the impeachment of the sitting president; the Chief Justice in both cases). Both documents vest the Senate with the sole power to try all impeachments. Both documents require senators to be under oath. The Philippine framers adopted the American architecture, but on the conviction threshold, they made a specific textual choice: they replaced "Members present" with "all the Members."

That substitution is the heart of the current debate. Those who argue for the fixed threshold of 16 contend that the framers deliberately chose a higher, more rigid standard than the American model, one that cannot be lowered by the absence or incapacity of individual senators. Those who argue for an adjustable threshold contend that "all the Members" was intended to mean all members who are legally qualified to serve, not members who have placed themselves beyond the reach of the legal system through suspension, detention, or flight from justice.

Both sides claim to honor the framers' intent. The fact that two of those framers, Davide and Azcuna, are now among the amici curiae advising the court means the Senate has an opportunity that rarely presents itself in constitutional disputes: the opportunity to ask the authors of the text what they meant when they wrote it.

What Happens Next

The amici curiae will present their views on September 16. The prosecution and defense will argue their positions on September 23. The senator-judges will then vote. Their decision will determine not only whether 16 votes or fewer are required to convict Vice President Sara Duterte, but also whether the Senate, as a constitutional institution, can function when a significant number of its own members are under criminal prosecution or in hiding from the law.

My friends and countrymen, the question before the Senate is not merely one of arithmetic. It is a question of whether the Constitution was written to protect the rights of the accused, to preserve the functional integrity of the institutions it created, or both at the same time, even when those two purposes appear to pull in opposite directions. Two of the men who drafted the relevant provision will soon tell the Senate what they intended. Whether the senator-judges will listen is a separate matter entirely, and that is a question only they can answer.

Long live the rule of law, and long live the Republic of the Philippines!

The post EXPLAINER: How Many Votes to Convict Sara Duterte? The Constitutional Arithmetic the Senate Must Now Resolve first appeared on Marcial's Law.

9/13/26

My friends and countrymen, this is an explainer to Vice President Sara Duterte's impeachment trial, which I have written about in The Case for the Conviction of Vice President Sara Duterte. The trial has placed a term at the center of national conversation that most citizens have heard but few have been asked to understand precisely: confidential funds. Before any Filipino judges whether ₱612.5 million in such funds was spent properly or improperly, every Filipino deserves a precise understanding of what those funds are and why the rules governing them exist.

What Confidential Funds Are

Confidential funds are lump-sum budget allocations given to civilian government agencies for a single, narrow purpose: surveillance and confidential information-gathering activities that support an agency's official mandate. They are authorized through the General Appropriations Act, the annual law that funds the entire national government, and governed by Joint Circular No. 2015-01, issued jointly by the Commission on Audit, the Department of Budget and Management, the Department of the Interior and Local Government, the Department of National Defense, and the Governance Commission for Government-Owned and Controlled Corporations.

These are not slush funds. They are not petty cash. They are not discretionary spending that an agency head may direct toward any purpose she sees fit. They exist for one category of activity, surveillance and information gathering, and for no other.

How Confidential Funds Differ From Intelligence Funds

This distinction matters more than most citizens realize, because the two terms are often used interchangeably in public conversation, even though they describe legally separate categories of spending with different rules.

Confidential funds are for civilian agencies. They cover surveillance-related expenses that support an agency's own operations, such as a mayor's office quietly monitoring narcotics activity in a municipality. Such an operation requires discretion but is not military work.

Intelligence funds are for uniformed and military personnel and designated intelligence practitioners from agencies such as the Armed Forces of the Philippines, the Philippine National Police, the Philippine Navy, and the Philippine Air Force. These cover information-gathering activities with a direct impact on national security, and their release requires prior approval from the President of the Philippines, a requirement confidential funds do not carry.

The dividing line is the nature of the work and the personnel performing it. Civilian surveillance in support of an agency's mandate falls under confidential funds. National security intelligence work performed by military or law-enforcement professionals falls under intelligence funds. The two are not interchangeable, and the law does not treat them as such.

How Confidential Funds Differ From Ordinary Government Spending

Here is where the distinction becomes most important for any citizen who pays taxes and expects them to be accounted for. Ordinary government spending, whether for school buildings, road repairs, or employee salaries, follows a standard trail of documentation: purchase orders, receipts, invoices, delivery confirmations, and itemized reports submitted to the Commission on Audit for regular review. A citizen, a journalist, or a legislator can, in principle, trace a peso from the treasury to the project it paid for.

Confidential funds operate under a fundamentally different accountability structure. Because the activities they finance are, by definition, meant to remain undisclosed, the standard receipt-and-invoice trail does not apply. Instead, disbursements are certified through accomplishment reports and sealed documentary evidence, submitted in sealed envelopes to a specialized COA unit called the Intelligence and Confidential Fund Audit Unit, which operates directly under the Office of the COA Chairperson. The COA itself has acknowledged that auditing these funds is inherently difficult, since the commission is largely dependent on trusting whatever the disbursing agency submits.

This is where the system's vulnerability lies. The reduced transparency is not a defect in the rules; it is a feature, designed to protect the operational security of legitimate surveillance work. It becomes a defect only when an agency treats the reduced documentation requirements as an invitation to spend without genuine accountability, which is precisely the allegation at the center of the current impeachment trial.

Who Handles the Money, and Who Is Liable

Confidential funds are entrusted to a Special Disbursing Officer, a regular government employee designated by the agency head. The SDO manages the funds, maintains the sealed documentation, and submits liquidation and accomplishment reports to the COA. Under the governing rules, both the SDO and the agency head can be held jointly and severally liable for failure to render proper accounts or for misuse of the funds, with penalties that include perpetual disqualification from public office.

This is not a minor administrative consequence. It means that when the Commission on Audit flags an irregularity in how confidential funds were disbursed, the person who signed off on the disbursement and the person who ordered it both face personal legal exposure, not merely institutional embarrassment.

The current trial has already put these roles to the test. Former OVP Special Disbursing Officer Gina Acosta testified that she disbursed the full ₱500 million in OVP confidential funds directly to Colonel Raymund Dante Lachica, head of the Vice Presidential Security and Protection Group, on Duterte's own orders. At DepEd, Special Disbursing Officer Edward Fajarda testified before the House that he handed confidential fund cash to Colonel Dennis Nolasco for distribution. In both agencies, the person who physically handled the money and the person who authorized its release are now exposed to the same legal consequences the governing rules were built to impose.

Why the DepEd and OVP Allocations Raised Questions

Not every government agency receives confidential funds, and not every agency that requests them has an obvious operational reason for doing so. The Department of National Defense, the Philippine National Police, and the Office of the President have clear mandates that align with surveillance and intelligence work. The Department of Education and the Office of the Vice President do not. This is not a political observation. It is a structural one: neither office has a law-enforcement, military, or intelligence mandate that would ordinarily justify confidential expenditures.

Duterte's defense has argued otherwise, contending that both offices conducted intelligence-adjacent activities, including anti-drug monitoring and campus safety work, that fell within the rules governing confidential fund use. Whether those activities actually occurred, and whether they account for the scale of spending now in question, is precisely what the trial's evidentiary phase is testing. The structural observation stands regardless: neither office's core mandate resembles that of the agencies for which confidential funds were originally designed.

When the Commission on Audit flagged ₱125 million of the OVP's confidential funds (Notice of Disallowance No. 2024-002-100, dated August 8, 2024) for having been disbursed in full within eleven days, it was testing exactly this question: whether spending of that speed and scale, from an office with no surveillance mandate, could be justified under the rules that govern these funds. That question remains at the center of Article I of the impeachment case.

Testimony from the trial's twentieth and twenty-first days sharpened this question considerably. Two Army colonels, Manaros Boransing II and Magtanggol Panopio, testified that their units never received confidential funds from DepEd for the Youth Leadership Summits their certifications had been used to justify, and that those certifications were never intended to validate confidential fund spending. The following day, former DepEd chief of staff Michael Poa, testifying as a hostile witness and himself a member of Duterte's defense team, confirmed under oath that not a single peso of DepEd's confidential funds went to the AFP for those summits. If the certifications submitted to the COA did not reflect actual confidential-fund expenditures, the question becomes what the funds were actually spent on, and whether the sealed documentation submitted to auditors accurately describes activities that took place.

The American Parallel: The Black Budget and the Church Committee

American readers, and Filipino readers familiar with the American system, will recognize a close parallel. The United States has its own version of confidential and intelligence funds, known informally as the "black budget." These are classified appropriations routed primarily through the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Department of Defense. Section 6 of the CIA Act of 1949 (50 U.S.C. § 3510) permits the agency to spend funds without adhering to standard federal fiscal reporting requirements, a structure that mirrors, in principle, the reduced-transparency framework governing Philippine confidential funds.

The parallel does not end with the structure. It extends to the abuse and the reform. In 1975, Senator Frank Church of Idaho led a sixteen-month Senate investigation into decades of secret spending by the CIA, FBI, and NSA. The Church Committee reviewed 110,000 documents, interviewed over 800 witnesses, and uncovered abuses that had been shielded from both Congress and the public for years, including assassination plots against foreign leaders, illegal domestic surveillance of American citizens, and covert operations conducted without meaningful oversight.

The reforms that followed created permanent intelligence oversight committees in both the Senate and the House, established a special court to review surveillance warrants, and required the Director of National Intelligence to publicly disclose the aggregate intelligence budget each year. The lesson for Filipino citizens is not that America solved the problem. It is that America recognized, through painful experience, that secret funds without meaningful oversight will eventually be misused, because the structure itself creates the opportunity, and opportunity without accountability is an invitation that someone, eventually, will accept.

Why This Matters to Every Taxpayer

A Filipino who has never handled a confidential fund and never will still pays for them. These allocations come from the General Appropriations Act, which means they come from the national budget, which means they come from the taxes paid by every worker, vendor, and business owner in the country. When confidential funds are spent on legitimate surveillance that protects public safety, they earn their secrecy. When they are spent on activities that have no connection to surveillance or intelligence gathering, or when they are disbursed so rapidly that no meaningful accounting is possible, the secrecy that was meant to protect the operation instead protects the person who spent the money.

That is the distinction every citizen should carry into any conversation about this trial. Confidential funds are not inherently corrupt. They are inherently vulnerable, because the very feature that makes them operationally useful, their exemption from standard transparency, is the same feature that makes them dangerous when the person holding them treats accountability as optional.

The Philippines already has two institutions designed to prevent exactly this kind of abuse: the COA's Intelligence and Confidential Fund Audit Unit, which reviews sealed documentation submitted by disbursing agencies, and the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee on Intelligence and Confidential Funds, Programmes and Activities, which exercises legislative supervision over how these allocations are spent. Whether those mechanisms are sufficient to prevent the kind of abuse now alleged is a question the trial itself is helping to answer. Citizens who wish to monitor the oversight committee's work can begin by following its published hearing schedules and the official records of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Understanding what confidential funds are is not a luxury reserved for auditors and legislators. It is a civic necessity for anyone whose taxes pay for them. The funds belong to the public. The secrecy that shields them is borrowed, not owned, by the officials entrusted with their use. When that trust is broken, it is not the auditor's loss. It is yours.

My friends and countrymen, follow this trial. Read the COA's findings. Demand transparency from the officials who spend your money in your name. After all, the republic endures only when its citizens refuse to look away.

Long live transparency in public service, and long live the Republic of the Philippines!

The post EXPLAINER: What Are Confidential Funds, and Why Should Every Filipino Understand Them? first appeared on Marcial's Law.

9/10/26

My friends and countrymen, on the nineteenth day of Vice President Sara Duterte's impeachment trial (about which I have written separately in The Case for the Conviction of Vice President Sara Duterte), Senator-Judge Robin Padilla attempted something bold: to place the names on the Office of the Vice President's confidential fund acknowledgment receipts, names like Mary Grace Piattos, Antonio Pagong, Timon Andrew Pusa, Don Piang, and Shane Ngitngit, in the company of the most revered aliases in Philippine history. He invoked the Katipunan. He recited a long list of revolutionary pseudonyms: Dimasalang, Siling Labuyo, Tikbalang, Magdalo, Lakambini, and others. He asked the prosecution counsel, Mae Divinagracia, whether she knew the name Marcial Bonifacio. She did not. Padilla answered his own question: Marcial Bonifacio was the alias Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino Jr. used on the passport that carried him home from exile in Boston in 1983, a name reportedly derived from martial law and Fort Bonifacio, where Aquino had been imprisoned for nearly eight years.

Let that be recorded accurately before any argument follows. Padilla's historical facts were not wrong. The Katipuneros did use aliases. Ninoy Aquino did travel under the name Marcial Bonifacio. These are documented, verifiable facts, and no honest commentator would dispute them. What Padilla did with those facts, however, is a different matter entirely. It is a textbook case of what logicians call false equivalence: placing two things side by side that share a surface resemblance, in this case, the use of aliases, while ignoring the fundamental difference in purpose, context, and consequence that makes the comparison collapse under any serious weight. That comparison deserves examination rather than applause.

Consider what the Katipuneros were doing when they adopted their aliases. They were concealing their identities from a colonial government that would have imprisoned or executed them for the act of organizing a revolution. Their pseudonyms protected their lives and the lives of their families. Ninoy Aquino adopted the name Marcial Bonifacio for the same essential reason: he was returning to a country governed by a dictator who had already imprisoned him for nearly eight years, and he needed to pass through an airport controlled by that dictator's military. In both cases, the alias shielded a person from the power of the state. In both cases, the person behind the alias was real, identifiable, and acting at personal risk.

Now consider what the names on the OVP's acknowledgment receipts were doing. They were not shielding anyone from a colonial government. They were not protecting a dissident returning to face a dictator. They were appearing on official documents submitted to the Commission on Audit to certify that the Office of the Vice President had disbursed public money, drawn from the taxes of Filipino workers, to named recipients for legitimate confidential activities. The question was never whether aliases can exist. The question was whether real people stood behind these particular names and actually received the funds those names were used to account for.

The Philippine Statistics Authority answered that question on Day 22 of the trial. Assistant National Statistician Marizza Grande testified that of 2,669 names listed as confidential fund recipients across the OVP and the Department of Education, 1,685 had no birth, marriage, or death records in the PSA's civil registry database. Thirty-seven names matched records of people already dead, including one, Marlene Sunga, who died in 1965 at two months of age and appeared as a fund recipient sixty years later. Twenty-five listed payees were minors, including two children who were only one year old when they supposedly received ₱400,000 each. Mary Grace Piattos, the most publicized name of all, had no record of any kind. "Wala po," Grande told the court.

Senator-Judge Bam Aquino, Ninoy's own nephew, delivered the rebuttal Padilla's argument deserved, and he did so with a precision that managed to be both legally serious and quietly devastating. Yes, he said, his uncle did use the alias Marcial Bonifacio to come home from Boston. However, Ninoy never handled confidential funds. Ninoy never received confidential funds. The name Marcial Bonifacio never appeared on any acknowledgment receipt. Moreover, one does not defend the appearance of a dead infant's name on a government disbursement document by invoking the courage of revolutionaries who risked their lives for independence.

Prosecution counsel Mae Divinagracia addressed the legal dimension directly. Commonwealth Act No. 142, the Anti-Alias Law, does not prohibit the use of assumed names outright, but it does require that a person disclose a true identity alongside any alias used. Her position rested on that specific obligation: no one had disclosed the true identities behind these receipt names to auditors, and no evidence established that the names corresponded to real people who actually received public money.

On Day 22, the defense itself confirmed what the prosecution had been arguing. Defense counsel Justin Gular, responding to a direct question from Senator-Judge Risa Hontiveros, acknowledged for the first time on the record that the names on the acknowledgment receipts are, in fact, aliases. Hontiveros had pressed the point because the defense appeared to be arguing two contradictory positions at once: that the names might be real people missed by PSA records, and that they were aliases all along. Gular chose the latter and, in so doing, he conceded the very premise that Padilla's Katipunan analogy was designed to make unnecessary: that the names require explanation.

Senator-Judge Raffy Tulfo, himself no critic of the Duterte family, added a detail that Padilla's analogy could not absorb. Examining the acknowledgment receipts, Tulfo observed that the signatures across multiple payees appeared to come from the same hand, calling the similar handwriting "very questionable." He said the aliases themselves might be forgivable, but identical signatures were not. The Katipuneros may have used borrowed names, but they did not (so far as history records) all sign their receipts with the same pen in the same hand.

Even I, your humble advocate, write this commentary under my own pen name, Marcial Bonifacio, a name I chose deliberately for the historical and symbolic resonance it carries. My readers know the name; my arguments are published under it; my accountability travels with it. A pen name used to protect a writer's identity (for fear of persecution) while publishing documented, verifiable arguments and patriotic literature is one thing. A name resembling a popular snack brand, attached to a government receipt certifying that public funds were received by a person who, according to the government's own population records, does not exist, is another thing altogether. Senator Padilla's error was not in knowing Philippine history. It was in believing that Philippine history could be made to excuse a practice that history's own heroes would have found unrecognizable and even detestable.

The Katipuneros used aliases to protect their lives while fighting for a nation. The question before this court is whether aliases were used to protect the disbursement of that nation's money from the scrutiny it was owed. Those are not the same act, nor are they comparable acts. On the contrary, one risked everything for the country, while the other (if the prosecution's evidence holds) risked the country's money for reasons no one has yet been able to explain.

My friends and countrymen, our heroes earned the right to hide their names. No one earns the right to hide behind a dead infant's name on a government receipt.

Long live the memory of those who risked their lives under borrowed names, and long live the Republic they fought to build!

The post Aliases, Heroes, and Acknowledgment Receipts: What Senator Robin Padilla Got Wrong first appeared on Marcial's Law.

9/4/26

My friends and countrymen, the United States of America is once again fighting to keep the sea lanes open to honest commerce, and it is not the first time (as I have shown in 8 Indisputable Reasons America Remains Exceptional at 250) a president has had to make that choice without asking permission from the men who would strangle American trade for tribute.

The First Barbary War: Jefferson and the Precedent

In the final years of the eighteenth century, the regencies of Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis, and the Sultanate of Morocco routinely seized American merchant vessels in the Mediterranean, enslaved their crews, and demanded annual tribute payments from the United States government in exchange for safe passage. This was not metaphorical piracy. It was a documented, decades-long extortion racket conducted against American shipping, and previous administrations under Presidents George Washington and John Adams had paid it rather than fight it.

Thomas Jefferson, upon assuming the presidency in 1801, refused to continue the practice. When Tripoli's Pasha, Yusuf Karamanli, demanded an increased tribute and declared war on the United States after Jefferson would not pay it, Jefferson dispatched a small naval squadron to the Mediterranean under strictly defensive orders, without first seeking a formal declaration of war from Congress. When Congress convened that December, Jefferson reported what he had done and asked for expanded authority, telling the legislature that the pasha's ultimatum, in his words, "admitted but one answer." Congress answered on February 6, 1802, with the Act for the Protection of Commerce and Seamen of the United States against the Tripolitan Cruisers, a statute declaring it lawful for the president's commanders "to subdue, seize, and make prize" of Tripolitan vessels and goods. The resulting conflict, known as the First Barbary War, ran from 1801 to 1805. It included the burning of the captured USS Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor by Stephen Decatur's raiding party in February 1804. The Philadelphia was a thirty-six-gun frigate carrying twenty-eight eighteen-pounder cannon and sixteen thirty-two-pounder carronades, manned by a crew of three hundred and seven, and built only five years earlier as one of the newest warships in the American fleet. Had the Tripolitans been able to refit and sail her, they would have possessed the most heavily armed vessel in the Mediterranean theater, outgunning every ship in their own navy several times over. Decatur's raid denied them that capability permanently. The war also produced the overland march of a mixed force of United States Marines and mercenaries under William Eaton against the city of Derne in April 1805, an engagement commemorated in the Marine Corps hymn's reference to the shores of Tripoli. The war concluded with the Treaty of Tripoli, signed on June 4, 1805, which ended tribute payments to that regency and secured the release of American captives.

The Second Barbary War: What Happens When Enforcement Lapses

The history that followed proves Jefferson was right to fight rather than pay, because the moment enforcement lapsed, the tribute returned. While the United States was occupied fighting Britain in the War of 1812, the Dey of Algiers resumed seizing American merchant vessels and enslaving their crews, exactly as the Barbary regencies had done before Jefferson's war. When the War of 1812 ended, President James Madison sent Commodore Stephen Decatur back to the Mediterranean with a ten-ship squadron in May 1815. Decatur captured the Algerian flagship Meshouda, killed the corsair Raïs Hamidou in the engagement, and dictated peace terms in the Bay of Algiers on June 30, 1815. The treaty ended all tribute payments permanently and secured full shipping rights for American vessels. The entire campaign, from departure to signed treaty, lasted approximately six weeks. This was not a new war. It was the same war, fought a second time because the first resolution had not been enforced while America was looking elsewhere. Any reader who believes the United States can simply walk away from the Strait of Hormuz and expect Iran to stop collecting tribute should study what Algiers did the moment the American Navy sailed home. Iran has already demonstrated the same pattern: the April 8 ceasefire paused the fighting, and the Revolutionary Guard Corps resumed its toll regime the moment the truce collapsed in early July, exactly as the Dey of Algiers resumed seizing American ships the moment American attention turned to Britain.

Jefferson did not fight his war for territory, and he did not fight it to remake Tripoli's government. Madison did not fight his war to govern Algiers. Each fought for one narrow, nameable objective: the end of tribute. Once that objective was secured, the war ended. Neither Jefferson nor Madison would accept a peace that left a foreign power taxing American commerce by force, but neither confused that principle with a mandate for open-ended war.

The Parallel: Trump and the Strait of Hormuz

The current war against Iran did not begin over shipping. It began on February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel carried out a preemptive strike on Iran's rapidly advancing nuclear and missile program along with its military leadership, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Iran's retaliation arrived that same day: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned all vessels over VHF radio that "no ship is allowed to pass the Strait of Hormuz," a waterway that had carried roughly a quarter of the world's seaborne oil trade before the war.

The path from there to renewed fighting was not a straight line to war, and readers skeptical of this conflict deserve to know that. Pakistan brokered an initial ceasefire on April 8, 2026, and mediation continued for months afterward. In mid-July, as the truce frayed, a further proposal reportedly floated by regional mediators would have let Iran collect what one source described as "reasonable service fees" for maritime security in the strait, in place of the unilateral, multimillion-dollar tolls the Revolutionary Guard Corps later imposed. That proposal did not hold. Iran's Foreign Ministry maintained it had no ongoing negotiations with Washington beyond talks with Oman over the strait itself, and President Trump, after a wave of Iranian strikes killed American service members in Jordan, dismissed further talks as a "waste of time." Whatever else is true of this war, it was not the first option reached for. It followed a real, if ultimately failed, diplomatic effort to reach the more modest arrangement Jefferson himself might have recognized: a paid right of passage negotiated rather than extracted at gunpoint. As of early September 2026, the situation has deteriorated further. On September 1, United States Central Command struck Iranian military targets around the strait, and on September 2, the United States struck two Iranian government tankers anchored off Iran's coast, the first reported case of tankers themselves being targeted. Iran retaliated with approximately twenty-five ballistic missiles and drone strikes against American-linked bases in Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Erbil. Strait transit volume has fallen to single digits per day against a pre-war baseline of eighty-five. Iran and Oman continue talks over navigation routes in the strait, and Qatar's Prime Minister visited Tehran in late August as part of ongoing mediation, but Iran's Foreign Ministry insists these discussions concern vessel routing, not reopening the waterway.

When the ceasefire collapsed and fighting resumed, President Trump notified Congress on July 10 that hostilities had resumed, and the fighting since has centered specifically on one demand: Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps operates what it calls the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, charging commercial vessels tolls of up to two million dollars, payable in Chinese yuan, Bitcoin, or Tether, for passage through routes Iran alone designates as safe. Ships that refuse to pay, or that use routes Iran has not approved, have been fired upon and disabled, including three vessels attacked on July 6 and 7, 2026.

Set the two demands side by side and the parallel is exact. Karamanli told Jefferson: pay tribute in gold, or your ships will be seized and your sailors enslaved. The Revolutionary Guard Corps tells commercial shippers: pay toll in cryptocurrency, or your ships will be fired upon and disabled. Jefferson answered a demand for gold with the United States Navy. Trump has answered a demand for Bitcoin the same way, ordering sustained air operations against Iranian military assets after the July toll attacks, having already made his posture toward Tehran clear months earlier when he declared there would be "no deal with Iran except unconditional surrender." Two presidents, separated by more than two centuries, reached the identical conclusion: a nation that controls the world's shipping lanes does not rent its own strait back from whoever threatens to close it.

Answering Two Objections

Critics raise two serious objections, and both deserve a direct answer rather than a sidestep.

The first concerns whether this is truly a war on terror, or something narrower. The Barbary States were sovereign regencies engaged in piracy and slave-taking, not a state accused of directing proxy militias such as Hezbollah, the Houthis, and various Iraqi armed groups. The distinction is real, yet it does not undercut the tribute parallel, because the Barbary States were themselves acting with the implicit protection of the Ottoman Empire, using state ports and state-sanctioned violence to extract payment from nations they judged too weak to fight back. Iran's use of the Revolutionary Guard Corps to enforce its Hormuz tolls follows the same structure: force applied by a state actor, with just enough deniability to complicate a clean response. The tribute, in both cases, was never really about the money. It was about who controls the passage.

The second concerns whether this war was ever lawfully authorized. This objection demands careful engagement, because its premise is partly right and partly outdated. Jefferson secured explicit statutory authorization through the front door: he told Congress what he had done, and Congress answered with a named statute granting him expanded power. Trump has not received that kind of explicit authorization. That much is true, and no honest commentator should pretend otherwise.

What is also true, however, is that no president since Franklin Roosevelt has operated under a formal congressional declaration of war. President George H.W. Bush ordered the invasion of Panama and the overthrow of Manuel Noriega in 1989 under Article II authority alone. President Clinton sustained a seventy-eight-day bombing campaign against Serbia over Kosovo in 1999 without congressional authorization and in direct defiance of a House vote that declined to endorse the air war. President Obama directed a seven-month air campaign against Libya in 2011 under Article II, continuing well past the War Powers Resolution's sixty-day deadline while the Office of Legal Counsel argued the operation did not constitute "hostilities" within the meaning of the statute. In each case, Congress protested, and in each case, the president continued. The constitutional norm that critics invoke, a formal declaration of war before the first shot is fired, has not been operative in American governance for eighty-four years. Trump's Article II claim is not novel. It is the standard modern template, used by presidents of both parties, for military operations the executive branch deems necessary to protect American national interests abroad.

Moreover, the Trump administration has never conceded that it exceeded the War Powers Resolution's sixty-day limit. The White House argued in a May 1, 2026 letter to Congress that the April 7 ceasefire terminated the original hostilities and stopped the clock. When fighting resumed in July, the president's July 10 notification to Congress opened a fresh sixty-day window. Senate Democrats, including Adam Schiff, Chris Van Hollen, and Tammy Duckworth, have publicly rejected that reading, and both the House and Senate passed war powers resolutions in 2026 aimed at restricting the president's ability to continue the war. Van Hollen, sponsoring a war powers resolution in the Senate, argued the case for restraint by pointing out that shipping in the strait had "once again been ground to a halt." It is worth stating plainly, however, that Van Hollen's own description of the problem is precisely the condition Jefferson and Madison went to war to end: a strait ground to a halt by a foreign power extracting tribute from commercial shipping. If the senator's diagnosis is correct, the Jeffersonian prescription is not withdrawal. It is the opposite.

Those resolutions, however, were concurrent resolutions with no force of law. They did not go to the president's desk, and they could not compel withdrawal. Congress possesses a constitutional instrument that can end any war at any time: the power of the purse. It has not used it. On the contrary, House Republicans passed a ninety-five-billion-dollar funding package that included direct appropriations for the Iran war. A Congress that funds a war while passing symbolic resolutions against it has, in constitutional terms, chosen the check that carries actual legal force over the one that does not. Jefferson received a yes in the form of a named statute. Trump has received a yes in the form of a signed appropriation. The vehicles differ; the constitutional effect, the decision to resource rather than defund, is the same.

Furthermore, President Trump's own March 2 report to Congress specifically cited among its justifications "ensuring the free flow of maritime commerce through the Strait of Hormuz," the very principle this essay argues is at stake. The freedom-of-navigation case is therefore not an interpretation Marcial Bonifacio, your humble advocate, has imposed on the war from outside. It is the legal position the administration itself has filed with Congress.

In an ideal constitutional order, Congress would still do what the Congress of 1802 did: pass its own Act for the Protection of Commerce, naming the Strait of Hormuz mission and granting the president explicit, bounded authority to keep it open. That a politically fractured Congress has proven unable to do so does not strip the president of the authority that Article II, eighty-four years of bipartisan precedent, and a funded appropriation have already conferred. It means Congress has defaulted on its own responsibility, not that the president has exceeded his.

What the War Has Cost, What Victory Would Deliver, and What Jefferson Would Ask of Us Now

Jefferson did not know his war would succeed before he began it. The First Barbary War lasted four years, produced no single decisive victory, and required a young nation to sustain a naval presence across the Atlantic at real cost. He fought anyway, because he judged indefinite tribute the greater cost, and Congress, when finally asked, agreed with him. When the tribute ended, so did the war. He did not stay to govern Tripoli.

The current war has already exacted its own price. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told the Senate Appropriations Committee on July 21, 2026, that the war has cost the United States thirty-seven and a half billion dollars to date, with experts warning the true bill will run higher. Eighteen American service members have died in connection with the conflict. Global oil prices have climbed past ninety dollars a barrel. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, describing the naval blockade's effect on Iranian oil exports, called the strategy "very effective," while Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana, a former Navy SEAL, told his Senate colleagues in late July 2026 that Iran's theocratic leadership constitutes a regime that must be neutralized, a judgment his Democratic colleagues on the same floor have directly disputed. Jefferson would not have waved these costs away. He buried sailors and spent money the young republic could not easily spare, and he did it anyway, because he judged that a nation which pays tribute once will be asked to pay it again, at a higher price, indefinitely. That same judgment, and not a comfortable certainty about how this war ends, is the actual case for seeing it through: not that the cost is small, but that the alternative, permanent submission to a toll collector in the strait, compounds rather than resolves it.

Skeptics who ask what victory would deliver in concrete terms deserve a concrete answer, because Jefferson's wars had clear endpoints and this one should too. The International Energy Agency has called the Hormuz closure the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Brent crude, which sat at seventy-two dollars a barrel on February 27, the day before the war began, surged past one hundred and twenty-six dollars at its peak in March, and every ceasefire announcement since has triggered an immediate drop of fourteen to twenty percent in global oil prices. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy estimated in March 2026 that the closure raised global energy prices by approximately five to eleven percent and food prices by three to five percent, driven by the cascade from oil through fertilizer costs to food production. The International Maritime Organization reported in April that twenty thousand mariners and two thousand ships were stranded in the Persian Gulf. These are not abstract strategic consequences. They are the grocery bill, the gas pump, and the heating invoice of every American household, and they will remain elevated for as long as Iran controls the strait.

Victory, in Jeffersonian terms, means an open Strait of Hormuz guaranteed by an enforceable agreement that permanently ends Iran's toll regime, restores unimpeded commercial passage, and brings global energy and food prices back toward the levels that prevailed before Iran closed the waterway. President Trump's own rhetoric has been broader than that, calling for "unconditional surrender" rather than a bounded treaty on a single issue, and this essay will not pretend that the two formulations are identical. The Jeffersonian precedent supports the narrower objective, not the wider one, and the case this essay makes is for the endpoint the precedent actually warrants. Jefferson's Treaty of Tripoli (1805) and Decatur's Treaty of Algiers (1815) are the models: a signed, enforceable document that ends the tribute, frees the passage, and allows the Navy to come home. Anything less invites the relapse of 1812.

Hence, the question Jefferson faced in 1801 is the same one worth asking plainly in 2026, without pretending the answer is free: does a nation that controls global trade have the standing to simply stop paying whoever threatens to interrupt it, even at a cost of eighteen lives and thirty-seven billion dollars and rising, or does it pay the toll and hope the demands do not grow? Jefferson chose the first answer, and his choice built the credibility that made the United States Navy the guarantor of freedom of navigation for two centuries afterward.

Whether this war built anything comparable is not yet settled, and will not be settled by this essay. However, the principle he established, that the United States does not pay tribute to sail its own trade routes, is the same principle now being tested in the Strait of Hormuz. Will this generation of Americans decide, as Jefferson's did, that the price of resolve is worth paying, bounded to its purpose and funded by a Congress that has voted with its wallet whether it admits so or not, rather than the price of tribute? My friends and countrymen, a nation that would not pay a pirate a single coin in 1805 should not pay a regime a single Bitcoin in 2026.

Long live the spirit of Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Donald Trump! Long live the USA!

The post From Tripoli to Hormuz: Why the War Against Iran Follows Thomas Jefferson's Example first appeared on Marcial's Law.

8/14/26

Updated:

9/2/26

My friends and countrymen, this is an explainer to Vice President Sara Duterte's impeachment trial, which I have written about in The Case for the Conviction of Vice President Sara Duterte. On the fifteenth day of the impeachment trial, a single Facebook post from a lawyer, one with no seat on the bench and no witness stand to answer from, threatened, for a moment, to become the day's biggest story. House private prosecutor Amando Virgil Ligutan posted a general statement about courtroom procedure. The defense called it a violation of Rule 18. Days later, the presiding officer delivered a ruling that reshaped how every lawyer, senator, and the Vice President herself must now conduct themselves outside the chamber. Before any citizen judges whether a Facebook post can derail a trial of this magnitude, the rule itself deserves a plain explanation.

What Rule 18 Actually Says

Rule 18 of the Senate's impeachment rules prohibits senators, House prosecutors, defense counsels, private counsels, and witnesses from making public comments or disclosures about the merits of a pending impeachment trial. In plainer terms, everyone with a formal role in the trial is barred from arguing their case anywhere except inside the Senate chamber itself. This is a version of what Philippine law more broadly calls the sub judice rule, a principle that prohibits public commentary on matters still awaiting a court's judgment, precisely so that public opinion, media pressure, or courtroom theater performed outside the courtroom cannot substitute for the evidence and arguments a tribunal is supposed to weigh on its own.

This is a concern the American founders themselves anticipated, long before Facebook existed to test it. Alexander Hamilton, writing in Federalist No. 65 in 1788 to defend the Constitution's design for trying impeachments, warned that such trials would rarely be decided on evidence alone, since the charges almost always touch matters that divide the public into rival camps before a single witness testifies. Hamilton's fear was that the accused's fate would turn on the comparative strength of the two parties rather than a fair demonstration of guilt or innocence, with the community choosing sides long before the tribunal rendered its verdict. Rule 18 answers a version of the same fear Hamilton raised two centuries earlier: that a trial conducted partly in public argument, rather than wholly within the chamber built to weigh it, ceases to be a trial in any meaningful sense at all.

The purpose is straightforward. A trial's integrity depends on the judges deciding the case based on what happens inside the proceeding, not on what lawyers post to their followers while the gavel is still in session. Impeachment court spokesperson Regie Tongol, addressing a separate Rule 18 controversy earlier in this same trial, put the principle plainly: senator-judges "are even more covered" by the rule than the lawyers arguing before them, since impeachment is inherently a political process, and any appearance that a judge has already formed an opinion risks damaging public confidence in the verdict itself.

What Actually Happened on Day 15

The controversy began during a heated cross-examination exchange between private prosecutor Lorna Kapunan and defense counsel Kristine Ferrer, in which Ferrer appeared to argue that misleading questions were permissible during cross-examination. At 11:29 that morning, Ligutan posted to Facebook a reminder that "misleading questions are not allowed even in cross-examination."

Lead defense counsel Sheila Sison raised the issue in a formal manifestation before the court, arguing the post mischaracterized Ferrer's courtroom position, disrespected a fellow member of the bar, and violated Rule 18's ban on public commentary about the case's merits. Ligutan defended himself to reporters afterward, saying his post named no one and referenced no case, and that he was confident he knew exactly where the line was and had not crossed it.

Presiding Officer Francis Escudero did not rule from the bench that day. He told the floor he had directed the clerk of court to monitor counsels' public statements throughout the week, and observed that one side had been "crossing the line many, many times." He promised a formal ruling, and delivered it several trial days later, on Day 19.

This Was Not the First Time

Weeks earlier, in June, Senator Robin Padilla, one of the senator-judges hearing the case, posted on Facebook defending his own courtroom questions about the authenticity of video evidence presented at trial. Tongol, the court spokesperson, confirmed that senator-judges are bound by Rule 18 as well, and warned that public statements suggesting bias could undermine confidence in the court's eventual decision. The Ligutan controversy is therefore not an isolated incident but the second public test of the same rule within a single trial, a pattern worth watching as the proceedings continue.

The Ruling, When It Came

Escudero's ruling arrived on Day 19, August 26, and came in three parts. First, rather than punish anyone for what had already been said, he wiped the record clean of every prior sub judice comment, Ligutan's post included, but made clear the reset would not repeat: "From this point forward, however, Rule 18 shall be strictly enforced and be given full force and effect." Second, he set a two-strike structure going forward: a first violation earns a public reprimand and admonition in open court, while a second or later violation carries a fine of up to ₱30,000 and, for lawyers, the possibility of the incident being referred to the Integrated Bar of the Philippines and the Supreme Court for professional discipline. Third, he ruled that alleged violations by senator-judges themselves would not be policed by the impeachment court directly, but referred instead to the Senate Committee on Ethics and Privileges, so that disciplining a fellow judge would not distract the trial from its actual purpose.

Escudero grounded the ruling in two goals: protecting the public's right to information about the trial while preventing the public from prejudging its outcome, and shielding the proceedings from what court spokesperson Reginald Tongol later called "extrajudicial trial by publicity." Before turning to the lawyers, Escudero first reminded the senator-judges of their own oath to do impartial justice, a sequencing that placed the court's obligation to itself ahead of the obligation it was imposing on everyone else.

As for Ligutan specifically, Escudero's response to his self-defense, that he had been acting instinctively as a law teacher, was direct: a lawyer may keep teaching outside the proceedings, but must set that role aside while participating in the trial itself. Because his post fell under the clean-slate reset, no sanction followed. He is, however, now subject to the same two-strike framework as everyone else should it happen again.

In a detail that underscored exactly what the rule was built to prevent, lead prosecutor Gerville Luistro told the court that Duterte herself had posted a public statement about the trial at the very moment Escudero was reading his ruling aloud. Escudero's answer was that the new rule was already in force by then regardless: "prospectivity will still apply." He declined to let the statement's contents be read into the record, since doing so would itself mean discussing the case's merits in open court, and directed her own counsel to remind her of the rule going forward.

Two Honest Perspectives

Those who see merit in the defense's complaint argue that the timing and content of Ligutan's post make its target obvious even without naming names. A statement about misleading cross-examination questions, posted minutes after a public exchange in which the defense had just argued the opposite position, functions as public commentary on the case regardless of whether a name appears in the text. Under this reading, Rule 18 exists precisely to prevent lawyers from litigating their case in the court of public opinion between recesses, and a technical absence of names does not cure that.

Those unpersuaded by the complaint counter that Rule 18, as written, prohibits comment on the merits of the case, meaning the underlying facts, the guilt or innocence of the Vice President, the strength of the evidence, not general statements of settled legal principle. Representative Terry Ridon made this argument directly, asking whether the post named a person or discussed the case's merits and concluding it did neither. Under this reading, a lawyer restating a rule every law student learns in evidence class is teaching, not litigating, and treating every adjacent public statement as a Rule 18 violation would leave lawyers unable to discuss the law at all while a trial is ongoing.

Both readings rest on a genuine ambiguity in the rule itself: whether "the merits" means only direct commentary on guilt or innocence, or extends to any public statement whose obvious context relates to a specific courtroom dispute. Escudero's eventual ruling did not resolve that ambiguity so much as sidestep it, choosing to forgive the past uncertainty entirely rather than adjudicate whether Ligutan's specific post had crossed the line. What his ruling did resolve was the standard going forward: strict, two-strike enforcement, with no more room for the kind of good-faith argument Ligutan and Ridon had made.

Why This Matters Beyond the Courtroom

A citizen with no interest in impeachment law might reasonably ask why a lawyer's Facebook post deserves this much attention. The answer lies in a broader principle that touches every Filipino who has ever followed a court case in the news, or discussed one with a neighbor. Sub judice rules exist because trials are supposed to be decided by evidence presented and tested inside a courtroom, not by whichever side manages to dominate public conversation while the case is pending. The same principle that restrains Ligutan restrains a barangay official commenting publicly on a pending case against a political rival, or a company executive posting about ongoing litigation involving a competitor, or, for that matter, any citizen serving on a jury who might be tempted to discuss the case with family before a verdict is reached.

The Philippine Supreme Court took this principle seriously enough to formally rule, in a matter involving former Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, that a public official's campaign of public statements about her own pending case violated the same sub judice standard now at issue in Ligutan's post, showing that this is not a minor procedural nicety invented for this trial but an established doctrine with real consequences reaching all the way to the nation's highest court.

My friends and countrymen, whether one Facebook post crossed a legal line is, in the end, a narrower question than the principle it tests. The principle is this: that citizens are entitled to a verdict reached through evidence weighed in the open chamber, not through whichever lawyer's post gained the most shares before the next recess.

Long live the rule of law, and long live the Republic of the Philippines!

The post EXPLAINER: Understanding Rule 18 - What the Ligutan Facebook Controversy Actually Means first appeared on Marcial's Law.

7/27/26

My friends and American countrymen, before a single sail was unfurled on the morning of August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus had already survived a gauntlet of obstacles sufficient to have ended the enterprise a dozen times over. The voyage that ultimately gave birth to the civilization we now inhabit was not the product of favorable circumstance. It was wrested from fourteen years of institutional rejection, erroneous science, financial precarity, crew insubordination, inadequate vessels, powerful enemies at court, and contractual negotiations that collapsed entirely before being revived at the last hour. Each of these difficulties is documented. Each of them, had it prevailed, might have consigned the New World to centuries more of European ignorance.

1. Fourteen years of institutional rejection.

Columbus first presented his westward proposal to King John II of Portugal in 1485. The Portuguese crown convened a committee of maritime experts, which dismissed his calculations and declined to sponsor him. He subsequently petitioned the courts of England and France, receiving no support from either. When he finally appeared before the Spanish crown in 1486, Queen Isabella referred the proposal to a maritime commission headed by Hernando de Talavera, her own confessor. That commission deliberated intermittently for four years. According to Bartolomé de las Casas, the Talavera commission declared the idea "impossible and vain and worthy of rejection." This verdict, preserved by las Casas and cited by Samuel Eliot Morison in Admiral of the Ocean Sea (Vol. 1, p. 131), is the most authoritative documentary record of the institutional resistance Columbus faced. It was not until Luis de Santángel intervened personally in January 1492 — after Columbus had already been turned away a third time — that the enterprise was revived. Any man of lesser resolve would have abandoned the project after the first rejection, let alone the fifth.

2. Disputed and erroneous geography.

The scientific foundation of Columbus's proposal was, by the judgment of his own contemporaries, mathematically unsound. While Columbus knew the Earth was round, he calculated its circumference 25 percent smaller than it actually is, and he overcalculated the size of Asia so that Japan lay just over 8,000 miles from Spain. Many of Columbus's contemporaries disagreed with these calculations, saying he had vastly underestimated the numbers. The Portuguese scholars who rejected his petition in 1485 were, in strict scientific terms, more accurate than Columbus himself. A peer-reviewed analysis published in IEEE Spectrum further establishes that when faced with several possible values for a key variable, Columbus would invariably choose the most optimistic, and that the great 1492 Enterprise of the Indies owes its existence to three serious measurement errors. The sobering implication is this: had the American continent not existed precisely where it did, Columbus's fleet would have exhausted its provisions in open ocean and perished without ever sighting land. The voyage succeeded not because Columbus's calculations were correct, but because an entire continent interrupted his fatal miscalculation.

3. Chronic insufficiency of financing.

Even after royal approval was granted in principle, the financial foundation of the voyage remained precarious and dependent upon a single private actor. The path to funding was not smooth: a royal commission led by Hernando de Talavera had reviewed Columbus's proposal and, in 1490, dismissed it as "impossible and vain." Only after the conquest of Granada in January 1492 did Ferdinand and Isabella override the commission and seal the deal in the Capitulations of Santa Fe on April 17, 1492 — a contract that promised Columbus ten percent of all gold, silver, spices, and precious stones he brought home. The royal treasury alone did not close the financial gap. The account books of Luis de Santángel and Francisco Pinelo preserve the transaction with precision: "Santángel is credited with an item of 1,140,000 maravedis which he gave to the Bishop of Avila for Columbus's expedition." Without that private advance — contributed by one man acting on his own conviction — the crown's commission would not have been sufficient to equip three ships for an ocean crossing of indefinite duration. Columbus was never more than one withdrawn patron away from the end of his enterprise.

4. Crew reluctance and the threat of mutiny.

The most dangerous crisis of the voyage did not arise from the sea. It arose from the men sailing it. After more than thirty-one days at sea without sight of land, the crew of the Santa María arrived at the threshold of open mutiny on Wednesday, October 10, 1492 — two days before landfall. Columbus records the moment in his own journal, as preserved by Bartolomé de las Casas: "Here the men lost all patience, and complained of the length of the voyage, but the Admiral encouraged them in the best manner he could, representing the profits they were about to acquire, and adding that it was to no purpose to complain, having come so far, they had nothing to do but continue on to the Indies, till with the help of our Lord, they should arrive there." A separate contemporary account, recorded by the historian Peter Martyr d'Anghera in De Orbe Novo (1511) and cited by Arnold K. Garr of Brigham Young University, establishes that the threat had reached a far graver dimension: the sailors even conspired to do away with their leader, whom they "planned to throw into the sea." Land was sighted less than forty-eight hours after that ultimatum. Had the crew acted on their conspiracy even one day earlier, or had Columbus yielded to their demands, the voyage would have returned to Spain having discovered nothing.

5. The inadequacy of the vessels.

The three ships assigned to the expedition were modest in scale, privately owned, and not originally constructed for open-ocean exploration of indefinite range. None of the three vessels were originally intended for oceanic exploration. Columbus was assigned the heaviest and slowest of the three. The peril was not theoretical. The Santa María, Columbus's flagship, ran aground on a reef off the coast of Hispaniola on Christmas Day, 1492, and was lost entirely. A single severe Atlantic storm — a routine meteorological hazard of the season — could have dismasted or sunk one or more of the vessels before any landfall was achieved. Samuel Eliot Morison, who retraced Columbus's voyages under sail before writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, captures the fragility of that final night at sea: "This night of October 11–12 was one big with destiny for the human race, the most momentous ever experienced aboard any ship in any sea. A brave trade wind is blowing and the caravels are rolling, plunging and throwing spray as they cut down the last invisible barrier between the Old World and the New." The fate of two continents rested on three wooden ships that the Spanish crown's own records describe as a low-risk gamble precisely because those in power did not expect to see them again.

6. Political opposition from powerful advisors.

The Talavera commission was not the only institutional force arrayed against Columbus. The commission first met in 1486 to investigate the feasibility of Columbus's proposal, seems to have met only intermittently, and it was not until 1490 that the board recommended against the plan. Later, in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella overrode the board's decision and decided to sponsor Columbus. For six years, the official machinery of the Spanish court produced nothing but delay and rejection. It required not the logic of Columbus's proposal — which the experts had already adjudicated and dismissed — but the personal advocacy of Friar Juan Pérez of La Rábida and the financial leverage of Luis de Santángel to displace the commission's authority entirely. Morison, the scholar who knew Columbus's career more intimately than any other, rendered his verdict in a single sentence: "He was man alone with God against human stupidity and depravity, against greedy conquistadors, cowardly seamen, even against nature and the sea." That sentence is not hagiography. It is a precise summary of the documentary record.

7. The contractual negotiations nearly collapsed.

Even after royal sponsorship was secured, Columbus's demands for hereditary titles and a ten percent share of all revenues proved so excessive, by the standards of the Spanish court, that the monarchs dismissed him entirely in early April 1492. Columbus departed court and was already on the road toward France to petition King Charles VIII when a royal messenger overtook him and summoned him back. Having endured years of scrutiny and rejection, Columbus prepared to abandon Spain in early April, intending to seek patronage from the French king. This departure prompted urgent intervention by Luis de Santángel, who personally financed much of the expedition and persuaded Queen Isabella of the venture's merits. Isabella recalled Columbus from the road and affirmed the crown's sponsorship. The Capitulations of Santa Fe, signed April 17, 1492, document the extraordinary terms Columbus ultimately extracted: Columbus was promised the title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and appointed viceroy and governor of newly claimed territories, and would receive ten percent of all revenues in perpetuity. The terms were unusually generous, but as his son later wrote, the monarchs were not confident of his return. A man who was not on the road to France at precisely that moment, or a messenger who did not ride fast enough, or a queen who did not reverse herself — any one of those variables would have ended the enterprise permanently.

Verdict.

My friends and American countrymen, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights did not emerge from favorable conditions. They emerged from a civilization that took root only because one man survived fourteen years of rejection, three erroneous geographic calculations, one near-fatal financing gap, a crew that conspired to drown him, three ships inadequate to the ocean they crossed, six years of expert opposition, and a contractual negotiation that had already failed before it succeeded. The record is documented. The sources are named. The verdict is not in doubt. Which of those seven obstacles would have broken you — and which of them broke Columbus? Long live the indomitable spirit that built this republic!

The post Seven Odds Against Columbus: How the Voyage That Built America Nearly Never Happened first appeared on Marcial's Law.

7-24-26

My friends and countrymen, this is an explainer for Vice President Sara Duterte's impeachment trial, which I mentioned in The Case for the conviction of Vice President Sara Duterte. On the seventh day of the trial, Senator Pia Cayetano raised an objection that many watching on television or scrolling through social media likely found confusing. She spoke of a "poisonous tree" and its "fruit." No plant was on trial, of course. She was invoking a legal doctrine, and it deserves an explanation in plain language before any citizen forms a judgment on whether her objection was sound. Her brother, Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, raised a second and equally important legal question days later, one that turns on a distinction many citizens use loosely without realizing it carries a precise legal meaning: the difference between wealth that is merely unexplained and wealth that is proven ill-gotten. Both objections deserve a plain explanation before any citizen judges whether they were sound.

What the Doctrine Actually Says

The fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine holds a simple idea: if the source of a piece of evidence was obtained illegally, then anything that grows out of that evidence, anything discovered because of it, is likewise tainted and should not be used in court. The tree is the illegal act. The fruit is everything that comes after it. If the tree is poisoned, the fruit cannot be clean, no matter how useful or damning it turns out to be.

Consider an everyday illustration. Suppose a police officer breaks into a person's home without a warrant and finds a ledger detailing a crime. If a court later allows that ledger into evidence, it rewards the illegal entry. Worse, if that ledger leads investigators to a second location, and a second illegal search turns up a weapon, the doctrine says the weapon cannot be used either, because the entire chain of discovery began with an unlawful act. The remedy is not to punish the officer alone. It is to remove the incentive for any officer to break the law in the first place, by making sure the fruits of that violation are worthless in court.

Where This Doctrine Comes From in Philippine Law

The concern is older than the Philippine Republic itself, and older than the United States as well. In 1761, a Boston lawyer named James Otis stood before a colonial court and argued against British "writs of assistance," general warrants that let customs officials search any home or warehouse without specifying what they sought. A young John Adams watched from the courtroom and later wrote that American independence was born that day. The grievance ran deep enough that the founders wrote its remedy directly into the Fourth Amendment, requiring every warrant to describe with particularity the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized.

The Philippine Supreme Court applied this very reasoning in Stonehill v. Diokno, a landmark 1967 ruling that struck down evidence gathered against an American businessman under warrants so broad they authorized searches of nearly anything, anywhere, described only in general terms. The Court ruled that such general warrants violated the constitutional right against unreasonable searches, and that evidence obtained under them could not be used, regardless of what that evidence revealed.

There is a striking irony worth noting plainly. The very case Senator Cayetano invoked was decided against the father of the current lead private prosecutor questioning witnesses in this trial, Chel Diokno. The same precedent, coincidentally, was raised by Chief Justice Renato Corona's defense team during his own impeachment trial in 2012.

What Senator Cayetano Actually Argued

Senator Cayetano's specific objection concerned the Anti-Money Laundering Council, or AMLC, and whether it had legal authority to disclose Vice President Duterte's financial records to the House of Representatives committee that was investigating her. Her argument, reduced to its simplest form, was this: if the AMLC had no legal basis to hand over that information in the first place, then the tree from which the entire financial case grew was poisoned, and everything built on top of it, the House committee's findings, the subpoenas, the allegations, should not be admitted.

The Prosecution's Answer

Prosecutor Chel Diokno offered a narrower reading of the relevant statute. He argued that Section 8-A of the Anti-Money Laundering Act was written to prevent individual AMLC officials from leaking financial information on their own initiative, not to block a subpoena issued by a lawful tribunal such as an impeachment court. A subpoena from a constitutionally recognized body, in his view, is a fundamentally different legal act than an unauthorized leak, and the poisoned-tree analogy does not stretch to cover it.

A Related Objection: Two Different Kinds of Wealth

Senator Alan Peter Cayetano raised his own objection in the same exchange, pressing the prosecution on whether the House had actual evidence before it began investigating, or whether it went looking for evidence only after deciding Duterte was guilty. His questioning did not stop there. He pushed further into a distinction worth understanding on its own, since it turns on two terms that sound similar but mean very different things in law. He asked Diokno directly, "Do you have the evidence, or are you fishing for the evidence?" His deeper concern was whether a mere gap between what Duterte declared as income and what she actually owned was enough, by itself, to justify subpoenaing years of her financial life before she had any chance to explain that gap herself.

Here is the distinction his question rested on. Unexplained wealth is a description. It simply means a public official's recorded wealth exceeds what her lawful income can account for, and no explanation has yet been given for the difference. Ill-gotten wealth is a conclusion. It means that gap has been examined and found to come from an unlawful source. Cayetano's worry was that treating the first term as though it already proved the second would let prosecutors search first and justify the search later.

Diokno's answer rested on a specific law, Republic Act No. 1379, which governs the forfeiture of unlawfully acquired property. That statute holds that when a public official's wealth is manifestly disproportionate to her lawful income, and she cannot explain the difference, the law presumes the excess was unlawfully acquired, unless she rebuts that presumption with an explanation of her own. Diokno offered a simple illustration: wealth traceable to an appreciated land sale would be explained wealth, and only the records themselves, not an assumption of guilt, would reveal which kind Duterte's is. His closing line to the court captured the whole exchange: "That's precisely why, your honor, they call it 'unexplained wealth.'" The term itself, in other words, is not an accusation. It is the legal trigger that requires an official to speak up before the presumption against her hardens into something worse.

The Senate impeachment court, weighing all of these arguments, ruled in favor of issuing the subpoenas. Both objections were heard fully and fairly. Neither prevailed at this stage.

Two Honest Perspectives

A fair explainer must present both sides as their strongest advocates would, and let the reader judge.

Those who see merit in Senator Cayetano's objection point out that constitutional protections against unreasonable searches exist precisely to restrain the government when it is investigating the powerful, not only the powerless. If institutions can quietly hand over any citizen's financial data without proper legal basis, then no one, prominent or ordinary, is protected. A senator raising this objection loudly and publicly, they argue, does the nation a service by forcing prosecutors to prove their evidence was gathered lawfully rather than assuming lawfulness because the target is unpopular.

Those skeptical of the objection counter that Senators Pia Cayetano and Alan Peter Cayetano are widely known allies of the Duterte family, and that raising a procedural objection this technical, this late, and this specific to a single disclosure mechanism, functions as a delay tactic rather than a genuine constitutional concern. They further note that an impeachment court is not a criminal court bound by the same exclusionary rules developed for criminal prosecutions, and that Congress's oversight power to investigate a public official's conduct in office operates on a different constitutional footing than a police officer's power to search a private home.

A similar split exists over Senator Alan Peter Cayetano's unexplained-wealth question. Those sympathetic to his concern argue that due process matters even for the powerful, and that no official should have years of financial records exposed on the strength of an income gap alone, without first being asked to explain it. Those unpersuaded reply that Republic Act No. 1379 was written precisely to place that burden on the official, not on the accuser, and that Diokno's answer did not sidestep the law but applied it exactly as the legislature intended: the presumption exists so that citizens are not left waiting years for proof that may never surface if the official controls all the relevant records.

Both positions rest on real legal principles. Neither is frivolous. The impeachment court chose to allow the evidence, but that ruling settles the immediate procedural question. It does not settle the broader debate over how far this doctrine should reach into congressional investigations, a debate legal scholars will continue long after this trial concludes.

Why This Matters to Every Filipino, Not Just Politicians

Here is the doctrine's practical relevance for readers who have never appeared before a Senate impeachment court and likely never will. The same protection Senator Cayetano invoked for Vice President Duterte is the protection an ordinary Filipino would invoke if police searched a home without a warrant and used what they found to build a criminal case, or if a barangay official accessed a person's bank records without legal authority and passed them to a rival for political leverage. It is the same principle cited in countless drug war cases nationwide, where defense lawyers have argued that evidence planted or seized without a valid warrant should never have reached a courtroom. It is the same principle a small business owner would rely on if a local government unit obtained financial records through an improper channel and used them to justify a politically motivated tax investigation.

The unexplained-wealth presumption has its own everyday counterpart, one many Filipinos already recognize by another name: the lifestyle check. When a barangay captain drives a vehicle worth many times her declared salary, or a customs employee builds a house no ordinary government paycheck could finance, ordinary citizens invoke the very same logic Diokno used in the impeachment court, that an unexplained gap between income and lifestyle is itself grounds for scrutiny, not proof of innocence until someone else proves the theft. This is not a special rule invented for a vice president. It is the same rule a barangay assembly can invoke against its own captain.

The doctrine exists because the government's power to gather evidence must be paired with a government that follows its own rules while gathering it. When a senator invokes it on behalf of a vice president, and a public school teacher's lawyer invokes the identical principle defending a student wrongly implicated by an illegal search, they are standing on the same constitutional ground. That ground either holds for everyone or it protects no one.

My friends and countrymen, understanding these two doctrines is not merely an academic exercise for lawyers and senators. Each is one of the walls the Constitution and our laws have built between citizens and the power of the state, walls that stand whether the person behind them is a vice president or a jeepney driver.

Long live the rule of law, and long live the Republic of the Philippines!

The post EXPLAINER: Understanding Two Objections at VP Sara Duterte’s Impeachment Trial---"The Fruit of the Poisonous Tree" and "Unexplained Wealth" first appeared on Marcial's Law.

7-21-26

Updated:

7-25-26

My friends and countrymen, the Senate of the Philippines now sits as an impeachment court to try Vice President Sara Duterte for the second time in her single term of office, a distinction held by no other Filipino official since the restoration of our democracy in 1986. The House has already impeached her; what remains is whether the Senate will convict. The trial that began on July 6, 2026, is not a spectacle of dynastic rivalry, however much the Marcos-Duterte feud tempts commentators to treat it as one. It is a constitutional proceeding grounded in specific articles, specific sums of money, and a specific threat against the life of a sitting president. I have compiled the evidence for your consideration, and I trust you, as I always have, to draw the conclusion it demands.

The Constitutional Foundation

Article XI, Section 3(5) of the 1987 Constitution bars a second impeachment complaint against the same official within one year of the first. This is precisely why Duterte's first impeachment, initiated in February 2025, was struck down by the Supreme Court in July 2025 on procedural grounds, and precisely why the four complaints filed in February 2026 waited until the one-year bar expired before they were formally initiated. The process that produced the current Articles of Impeachment on May 11, 2026, when 257 of 318 House members voted to impeach her, followed the very roadmap the Supreme Court itself laid down. This is not a shortcut. It is compliance with the Court's own ruling.

Once the Articles reached the Senate, the Constitution left no room for delay or dismissal. Former Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonio Carpio stated plainly that once the Articles of Impeachment are submitted to the Senate, trial must proceed at once, and that the process cannot be terminated by a mere motion to dismiss. Carpio noted further that the Constitution's own Filipino-language text uses the word "forthwith," meaning immediately, leaving no ambiguity for senators inclined to slow-walk the proceedings. This is not a partisan reading. It is the plain text of our founding law.

The Legal Grounds

The Articles of Impeachment allege culpable violation of the Constitution, graft and corruption, betrayal of public trust, bribery, and other high crimes. Article I concerns the alleged misuse of confidential funds: P500 million from the Office of the Vice President and P112.5 million from the Department of Education during her tenure as its secretary, totaling roughly P612.5 million. The Commission on Audit itself flagged P125 million of these confidential funds in July 2023 for having been spent in full within eleven days. Under Republic Act 3019, the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act, public officials who fail to account for public funds entrusted to them face both administrative and criminal liability, a standard the Commission on Audit's own finding of an eleven-day disbursement window was designed to test.  Article II concerns unexplained wealth disproportionate to her lawful income. Article III concerns bribery and procurement irregularities at the Department of Education. Article IV concerns her documented threat against the lives of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, and former House Speaker Martin Romualdez.

It is worth stating plainly what impeachment is and is not. It is not a criminal trial, and conviction here would not brand Duterte a felon; it would only end her tenure and bar her from future office. The Constitution set a lower threshold, betrayal of public trust, precisely because the public should not have to wait years for a criminal court before removing an official found unfit to hold power.

House Representative Terry Ridon, one of the complainants, described the scale of the flagged transactions as impossible to explain through lawful income or declared assets, calling the House vote a constitutional act of accountability rather than a political exercise. Regardless of the complainant's motives, the underlying claim is a legal one, and it deserves a legal answer, not a political one.

Duterte's counsel calls the case against her baseless and the product of a family feud with the Marcos administration. The prosecution calls the same set of facts a matter of public trust owed to the electorate. Both claims cannot be weighed by rhetoric. They can only be weighed against the Commission on Audit's own findings, the AMLC's own reports, and the Vice President's own recorded words, none of which originate with her political rivals.

The defense's strongest procedural objection came not from Duterte's own counsel but from the bench itself. Senator Pia Cayetano, presiding as a judge in the case, invoked the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine during the trial's seventh day, questioning whether the Anti-Money Laundering Council had any legal basis to disclose Duterte's financial records to the House committee in the first place. Her brother, Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, pressed the same concern from a different angle, asking prosecutor Chel Diokno directly whether the House possessed evidence of wrongdoing or had impeached first and gone looking for evidence afterward. Both senators invoked Stonehill v. Diokno, a 1967 Supreme Court ruling that struck down evidence gathered under an unconstitutional general warrant, a precedent that happens to have been decided against the prosecutor's own father and was previously raised in Renato Corona's defense as well.

The prosecution's answer rested on a narrower reading of the statute. Diokno argued that Section 8-A of the Anti-Money Laundering Act was written to prevent unauthorized leaks by individual AMLC officials, not to bar a subpoena issued by a lawful tribunal, including an impeachment court. Senator Cayetano pressed further still, asking Diokno directly, "Do you have the evidence, or are you fishing for the evidence?" His concern was one of definition as much as procedure. Unexplained wealth and ill-gotten wealth are not the same claim. The first describes a gap between declared income and actual net worth. The second describes a conclusion that the gap was filled unlawfully, and Cayetano questioned whether the prosecution was permitted to subpoena a lifetime of financial records before Duterte had any chance to close that gap herself.

Diokno's answer rested on Republic Act No. 1379, the law governing forfeiture of unlawfully acquired property, which holds that a documented gap of this kind creates a prima facie presumption that the excess was unlawfully obtained, a presumption the official may rebut with her own explanation. Wealth traceable to an appreciated land sale would be explained wealth, Diokno said, and only the records themselves, not an assumption of guilt, would show which kind Duterte's is. "That's precisely why, your honor, they call it 'unexplained wealth,'" he told the court. The impeachment court weighed both arguments and ruled in favor of the subpoenas. The objection was heard. It did not prevail. Even so, five senator-judges, Alan Peter Cayetano, Pia Cayetano, Loren Legarda, Imee Marcos, and Camille Villar, later filed separate manifestations registering continued reservations about the subpoena's scope. The ruling settled the procedure. It did not settle every judge's mind.

The Criminal Exposure

Beyond the impeachment court, Duterte and her husband, lawyer Manases Carpio, face independent criminal exposure. The Anti-Money Laundering Council confirmed that banks submitted 630 covered transaction reports and 33 suspicious transaction reports tied to accounts linked to the couple, amounting to roughly P6.77 billion in transactions dating back to 2006. Suspicious transaction reports of this volume are the statutory trigger under the Anti-Money Laundering Act, Republic Act 9160, for further civil forfeiture and criminal investigation, independent of whatever the Senate decides. The National Bureau of Investigation separately reported that handwriting analysis found signatures on confidential-fund liquidation documents inconsistent with authentic specimens, a finding at the center of allegations of falsification. None of these findings are convictions. They are, however, documented findings by government agencies charged with exactly this kind of forensic work, and they establish that Duterte's legal exposure does not end even if the Senate acquits her.

The Moral Argument

Here is where the case rests most heavily, my friends. Betrayal of public trust is not merely a legal category under our Constitution. It is a moral standard, and it applies to every official regardless of family name, regardless of popularity, and regardless of which political dynasty they descend from. Duterte's own words, delivered in a profanity-laced broadcast in November 2024, included an instruction that if she were killed, someone should go kill the President, the First Lady, and the former Speaker. She has never disavowed the remark as a joke. In fact, she said so herself immediately after making the threat, repeating the phrase for emphasis: "No joke. No joke."

Senior NBI Agent John Mark Calilung, the prosecution's first witness, testified under oath that the threat was absolute, telling the impeachment court it did not depend on Duterte's own survival to become real. A second NBI officer, Regional Director Jeremy Lotoc, went further days later, calling the threat "serious, actual, and real" and warning that leaving it unaddressed risked plunging the country into chaos. Two officers from the same bureau, testifying on separate days, reached the identical conclusion independently. Duterte's own defense is that the threat was conditional revenge, activated only by her own death, and therefore protected as an exercise of free expression rather than a genuine, actionable threat. Calilung's testimony that the threat was absolute cuts against this framing directly. A threat need not be immediate to be real: it commits a named person to kill three others the moment a single condition is met, and it is the commitment, not its timing, that the law treats as the offense.

On the trial's eighth day, NBI Director Melvin Matibag added a third layer of evidence, presenting the court with video from 2011 showing Duterte, then mayor of Davao City, striking a court sheriff four times during a property dispute. Matibag testified that pattern of violence is one of five factors the NBI weighs when assessing whether a threat is serious, a framework the bureau has said is modeled on the one used by the United States Secret Service. As part of that same assessment, Matibag testified that his task force had reviewed an affidavit filed with the International Criminal Court by former Davao police officer Arturo Lascañas, alleging Duterte's own involvement in the anti-drug operation known as Oplan Tokhang, the very operation at the center of her father's pending ICC prosecution. The following day, under cross-examination by the defense, Matibag went further still, testifying that Duterte's own statement was already an admission consummating a betrayal of public trust, since her oath of office bound her to execute the law and do justice to every man, not to execute the President. The defense moved to strike the remark from the record. The motion was overruled.

The record shows the assassination threat did not stand alone. In October 2024, Duterte warned Senator Imee Marcos that she would dig up her father's remains and throw them into the West Philippine Sea. Weeks earlier, she had publicly described her fantasy of beheading Marcos Jr.

Surely, Duterte, being a trained legal mind, does not need to be told that a documented pattern of this kind carries evidentiary weight in a court of impeachment. Indeed, a public official entrusted with the second-highest office in the land owes the nation sobriety in moments of crisis, not incitement, especially one elected by 32,208,417 voters--- the highest vote total of any vice-presidential candidate in Philippine history.

In 2012, the Senate convicted and permanently disqualified Chief Justice Renato Corona on a fraction of the documented irregularities now before it. A standard applied to a chief justice cannot quietly become optional for a vice president simply because her father commands a national following. The same standard I would apply to any official of any party, I apply here: documented misuse of public funds, a documented threat against the life of a president, and documented financial irregularities running into the billions of pesos are not matters that any elected official, however popular, should escape simply because a two-thirds vote in a divided Senate is difficult to secure.

Verdict

The evidence assembled here is not speculation. It is drawn from the Commission on Audit, the Anti-Money Laundering Council, the National Bureau of Investigation, sworn House testimony, and the Vice President's own recorded words. Even senator-judges sympathetic to Duterte's cause raised their strongest procedural objection to this evidence and lost. The Constitution requires 16 of 24 senators to convict. Whether the Senate finds the political courage to reach that number remains uncertain, given the shifting allegiances within that chamber. But the question before every citizen, Filipino and American observer alike, is not whether Sara Duterte is popular. It is whether a public officer who threatens the life of a sitting president and stands accused of misappropriating hundreds of millions of pesos in confidential funds should be permitted to remain a heartbeat from the presidency. Which standard would you rather see applied to those who govern you: the standard of loyalty to a name, or the standard of loyalty to the Constitution?

One more fact belongs on the record before you answer. Duterte herself has not once appeared before the court since the trial began on July 6. On July 16, with travel authority approved by the Office of the President, she left the country on a trip that included a stop in The Hague, the same city where her father remains in International Criminal Court detention awaiting his own trial for crimes against humanity. The House prosecution panel's farewell was brief and pointed. "Safe travels and happy trip, and hope she'll be back soon," said Representative Zia Alonto Adiong, the panel's spokesman.

My friends and countrymen, there is no shame in demanding accountability from those we once trusted. There is only shame in looking away.

Long live the rule of law, and long live the Republic of the Philippines!

The post The Case for the Conviction of Vice President Sara Duterte first appeared on Marcial's Law.

7/9/26

My friends and countrymen, both American and Filipino, on July 6, 2026, the Senate impeachment court of the Republic of the Philippines opened the trial of Vice President Sara Duterte, and within the first half hour, before a single witness was called, the senator-judges were locked in a constitutional dispute over who was even permitted to hold the gavel. Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, the ousted Senate President, insisted that only the sitting Senate President could preside over the trial. Senate President Sherwin Gatchalian and the majority bloc disagreed, and by a vote of 12 to 8, the court elected Senator Francis "Chiz" Escudero to preside instead. This dispute is not merely a Philippine curiosity. It sits atop the same constitutional silence that the United States has wrestled with since 1787, and understanding how the two nations have handled that silence tells us something important about what each constitutional order actually protects.

What Both Constitutions Actually Say

Article XI, Section 3, Paragraph 6 of the 1987 Philippine Constitution states that when the President is on trial, the Chief Justice presides but does not vote, and conviction requires the concurrence of two-thirds of the Senate. The American original is nearly identical in structure. Article I, Section 3, Clause 6 of the United States Constitution provides that the Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments, and that when the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside, with conviction requiring the concurrence of two-thirds of the members present.

Both documents name a presiding officer for exactly one scenario: the impeachment of the sitting president. Both documents are silent on every other case. This is not an oversight. It is a structural choice, and Cayetano built his entire argument on the theory that the framers of both nations left that silence intentional in a specific direction, toward the Senate President by default.

Why the Chief Justice Only Presides for the President

The American rationale is documented and specific. The Chief Justice presides over a presidential trial because the ordinary presiding officer of the Senate is the Vice President, and the Vice President cannot be permitted to preside over the proceeding that could elevate him to the presidency. As the Library of Congress's Constitution Annotated explains, the framers built this exception around a specific danger: a sitting Vice President judging the very trial that might hand him the presidency. That risk was not theoretical in the founding era, when a President and Vice President could come from opposing factions rather than a single ticket, as the pre-Twelfth Amendment system allowed.

The Philippines inherited this same design, and for the same reason. Neither constitution asked the Chief Justice to preside as a general safeguard of gravitas. Both asked him to preside to solve one specific conflict of interest, and only that one.

What Hamilton's Reasoning Suggests, and What It Does Not

America's founders left no record addressing a Vice President's own impeachment trial directly, and honesty requires saying so before saying anything else. However, Alexander Hamilton did explain, in Federalist 65, why the Senate was entrusted with impeachment at all, and why the Chief Justice's role was carved out as narrowly as it was. Hamilton considered and rejected uniting the Supreme Court with the Senate as the impeachment tribunal, reasoning that the same judges might later face the convicted official again in a criminal proceeding, and that having tried him once, they could not be trusted to judge him a second time without prejudice. Giving the Chief Justice a seat only in presidential trials was, in Hamilton's own words, "the prudent mean" between two flawed extremes, a partial adoption of judicial involvement without its full cost.

That reasoning was built for one specific problem: the Vice President, as the Senate's ordinary presiding officer, could not be trusted to preside over a trial that might elevate him to the presidency he stood to inherit. Nothing in Hamilton's argument addresses what happens when the Vice President is not the beneficiary of the trial's outcome but its subject. The founders solved the conflict they saw coming. They left unaddressed the one they did not.

This matters for both nations weighing the current dispute. It means the American constitutional design was never silent by accident on the presidential case, and never silent by oversight on the vice-presidential case either. It was silent because the specific problem of a sitting Vice President as defendant did not present itself to a convention working from the more urgent fear of executive overreach. Cayetano's framers'-intent argument in Manila rests on an actual, documented convention exchange. An American framers'-intent argument on this exact question would rest on inference from adjacent reasoning, not a comparable exchange, and the piece should not claim more certainty for one side than the record permits.

The Genuinely Unsettled Question: Who Presides Over a Vice President's Trial?

Here the comparison sharpens considerably, because the American Constitution has never actually answered who presides when a Vice President, not a President, stands trial. The Congressional Research Service's own account of Senate impeachment procedure confirms the gap directly: outside the four requirements the Constitution itself specifies, the Senate writes its own rulebook for every trial, and no rule in that book has ever named who takes the gavel when a Vice President, rather than a President, sits in the dock. No provision addresses a sitting Vice President as defendant, and it is doubtful the Vice President would be permitted to preside over their own trial, since as president of the Senate, the Vice President would ordinarily preside over every other impeachment. Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973 before it came to that. The question Cayetano and Gatchalian argued over in Manila this month is, in the American system, not a resolved precedent at all. It is an open constitutional gap, no different in kind.

Precedent for a Senate-Elected Presiding Officer

The United States has, however, tested a related question and settled it by vote rather than by court order. During Donald Trump's second impeachment trial in 2021, Senate Republicans argued the Chief Justice was constitutionally required to preside even after Trump had left office, though that objection was entangled with a separate dispute over whether a former officeholder could be tried at all. The Senate rejected the presiding-officer argument by a vote of 55 to 45, and Senator Patrick Leahy, the President pro tempore, presided instead. That is the closest American analogue to what happened in Manila. A minority raised a constitutional objection to the presiding officer's authority. The body did not accept the objection as self-executing. It put the question to a vote and moved forward with its chosen presiding officer.

The parallel extends further into procedure. Under long-standing Senate precedent, constitutional points of order in impeachment trials are not ruled on by the presiding officer alone. They are submitted to the full body for a vote. This is precisely what Escudero did when he declined to rule on Cayetano's objection himself and instead treated the matter as one for the Senate to resolve through the ballot, a procedural instinct both chambers apparently share.

Where the Two Situations Diverge

Here the parallel breaks, and it breaks in a way that matters more than the presiding officer question itself. The American precedent involved no dispute over whether Leahy was validly the President pro tempore, nor any question about whether the session that seated him was properly convened. The fight was confined to the single constitutional question on the table.

The Philippine dispute is layered atop a second, unresolved crisis: whether the June 3, 2026 Senate session that removed Cayetano as Senate President, installed Gatchalian, and amended the impeachment rules was itself valid. Petitioners before the Supreme Court, in a Very Urgent Manifestation with Motion filed the same day the trial opened, cite Senate attendance records showing only 12 of 24 senators present at that session and argue that if it lacked a proper quorum, everything built upon it, including the amended rule and Escudero's election, is void as well. University of the Philippines constitutional law professor Paolo Tamase offered a narrower reading of the underlying question, telling Rappler that "the Constitution only designated a specific presiding officer for the impeachment of a President, taking that from the US Constitution." Everything else, in his reading, was left open to the Senate itself. But Tamase's reading answers the constitutional silence question. It does not touch the separate quorum and legitimacy question that the Cayetano bloc has placed before the Supreme Court.

The Framers' Intent Argument, and Its Limits

Cayetano's strongest evidentiary claim was that the 1986 Constitutional Commission considered and withdrew an amendment naming the Senate President as presiding officer, not because it was rejected, but because commissioners believed it was already understood. He invoked the exchange involving future Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr. to support this reading, and unbroken practice for nearly three decades appeared to bear it out. Davide himself, as sitting Chief Justice, presided over the 2000 to 2001 impeachment trial of President Joseph Estrada, the one instance where the Constitution's own presidential-trial rule applied without dispute. Cayetano is entitled to his inference from the withdrawn amendment. However, an inference is not a ruling, and Senator Kiko Pangilinan countered with the text itself, noting that nowhere in the Constitution's provisions on impeachment does it state that the Senate President must preside over any trial but the President's. The American record offers no comparably specific withdrawn-amendment episode for non-presidential cases, which means the Philippine debate rests on a firmer documentary foundation than its American counterpart, even though it remains, at bottom, an argument from silence.

What Comes Next, and Why Americans Should Watch Too

The Supreme Court's ruling on the pending petitions will determine far more than who holds the gavel. Should the Court find the June 3 session void for want of quorum, the amended rule and Escudero's presidency of the impeachment court fall with it, and the trial already underway would face a retroactive legitimacy challenge rather than a prospective one. Should the Court instead treat the presiding-officer question as a political question left to the Senate's own rules, as the Philippine majority and scholars including Tamase and Molo have argued, the trial proceeds undisturbed regardless of how the quorum dispute resolves. American readers should not mistake this for a foreign curiosity. The United States has never tried a sitting Vice President, and the same silence that Manila is litigating this month sits unresolved in Article I, Section 3, waiting for the day an American Senate faces the identical question with no settled answer of its own.

Verdict

Two constitutions, drafted two centuries apart on opposite sides of the Pacific, arrived at the identical structural choice: name the Chief Justice for the President alone, and trust the Senate to govern itself in every other case. The United States has tested that trust once, in 2021, and resolved it by vote without a constitutional crisis attached. The Philippines is testing it now, in the middle of a leadership fight whose legitimacy the Supreme Court has not yet settled. The presiding officer question, standing alone, is not the threat to either republic. What threatens a republic is when a genuine constitutional silence becomes the seam through which a separate, unresolved power struggle tries to pass unnoticed.

My friends and countrymen, watch the Court's ruling closely, not because it will tell you who should have held the gavel, but because it will tell you whether the Philippine Senate's own house is in order. A trial cannot stand on ground that is still being surveyed.

The post When the Constitution Does Not Say: Presiding Officers, Precedent, & VP Duterte's Impeachment Trial first appeared on Marcial's Law.

7-4-26

Note: The full version of this commentary can be accessed by clicking on this link.

My friends and American countrymen, for your convenience and in the interest of informed civic reflection on this 250th anniversary of America's independence, I have herein summarized the eight indisputable reasons why America remains an exceptional nation. These are not sentiments. They are documented facts, and I invite you to weigh them accordingly.

The first and most foundational reason is that America is a paragon of liberty in a form no prior civilization had achieved. Its government was the world's first to be constructed on the premise that sovereignty flows upward from the people rather than downward from a crown, a premise so radical in 1776 that King George III himself could not comprehend George Washington's voluntary resignation from power. That political liberty was reinforced by religious liberty, secured by the First Amendment against the very kinds of state-sponsored persecution that England under Henry VIII and France under Robespierre had inflicted on their own citizens. Liberty regardless of race, though delayed by the founders' tactical compromise with the slaveholding states, was ultimately vindicated by the 13th Amendment, the Civil War in which 324,000 white soldiers died in the cause of black freedom, and subsequent civil rights legislation that dismantled institutionalized racism across every sector of American life. Economic liberty, enshrined in a constitutional framework that no prior nation had attempted, generated a productive base so formidable that the United States surpassed Great Britain as the world's leading economy by 1900, issued 640,000 patents in its first century of operation, and produced the assembly line, the internet, and the smartphone. Finally, that liberty was extended abroad not through colonial annexation or resource extraction, but through military interventions in Korea, Kuwait, Kosovo, and elsewhere, in which America bore the cost and left the sovereignty intact. Political commentator Dennis Prager states the matter plainly: America has been the greatest model of liberty, the greatest spreader of liberty, and the greatest preserver of liberty the world has ever known. The most credible witnesses to that verdict are not partisans, but Orlando Patterson, a black Jamaican-born Harvard scholar who declares America "the least racist white-majority society in the world"; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who called the Declaration of Independence "a promissory note" of universal natural rights; and Frederick Douglass, the former slave who revered the Constitution and called it "a glorious liberty document." (For the expanded first reason and full version of this commentary, click on this link.)

The second reason is the Constitution's unbroken operation across 238 years. Political scientists Zachary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg, and James Melton calculated that the average national constitution endures only 17 years. The American Constitution has survived a civil war claiming 600,000 lives, two world wars, a Great Depression, and presidential assassinations, without once requiring replacement. France has replaced its national charter 15 times in the same period. Venezuela has done so 25 times. Haiti, 21. The Philippines, which shares significant constitutional DNA with the American system, has operated under 7 constitutions since 1899, each change following a period of political rupture. That America has required only one such reset in nearly two and a half centuries is not circumstance. Historian Bernard Bailyn demonstrated that the founders designed their governmental architecture with a deliberate, historically informed understanding of how republics fail, and built the constitutional mechanisms to prevent each failure mode they had studied. Constitutional stability is not merely a legal achievement; it is the precondition for every other liberty enumerated above.

The third reason is that anyone can become an American, while no American can become a Filipino, a Nigerian, a Mexican, or a Russian in the same sense. Throughout history, national identity has correlated with ethnic or racial identity. America was among the first nations, if not exclusively the first, to de-emphasize bloodline in favor of individual achievement and the adoption of a shared creed. Political scientist Samuel Huntington defined that creed as the embodiment of liberty, equality, individualism, representative government, and private property, and demonstrated that millions of immigrants achieved wealth and status in America precisely by assimilating to it. Andrew Carnegie, born in Scotland, built Carnegie Steel. Jan Koum, born in Soviet Ukraine, co-founded WhatsApp. Irving Berlin, a Russian Jewish immigrant who did not yet speak fluent English, wrote what became America's unofficial national anthem. The Latin motto E Pluribus Unum, from many, one, is not a slogan. It is a governing principle with no true parallel in the world's history of nations.

The fourth reason is that America's system of checks and balances was not derived from theory, but from the documented study of how every prior free republic had failed. The founders scrutinized Greece, Rome, France, and England, reading Aristotle, Polybius, Cicero, Montesquieu, and Locke not as ornamental scholarship but as operational intelligence. Athens fell to the mob, as illustrated by the trial and execution of Socrates by a 500-member jury of legislators in 399 BCE, and by the summary execution of eight generals after the Battle of Arginusae in 406 BCE. Rome fell to the dictator, as Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 BCE and the subsequent conversion of the Republic to an Empire under Octavian demonstrated. Britain fell to the monarch. The Constitution was designed, with historical precision, to prevent all three outcomes simultaneously, dividing power horizontally across three branches, and vertically between the federal government and the sovereign states, drawing on the Lycian Confederacy's model of proportional representation, which Montesquieu had identified in The Spirit of the Laws and Madison cited approvingly in Federalist 9.

The fifth reason is that America established and sustained the world's first tradition of the peaceful transfer of executive power, regardless of personal or political animosity between rivals. Every prior civilization had known violent, coerced, or dynastic transitions. Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times. King Charles I was beheaded. King Louis XVI was guillotined. George Washington, by contrast, voluntarily resigned the presidency and returned to his farm, prompting King George III to call him the "greatest character of the age," a reaction that itself confirms how incomprehensible voluntary abdication of power was to the world in 1797. When John Adams lost his reelection bid to his personal rival Thomas Jefferson in 1800, Adams attended Jefferson's inauguration. That institutional behavior in the face of personal hostility established the precedent that every subsequent American transfer of power has followed, and that other democracies have since attempted to emulate.

The sixth reason is that America has been, by measurable evidence, the most charitable nation in history. Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1831 that Americans of every condition perpetually formed voluntary associations to accomplish what Europeans left to the state. That observation has been vindicated by nearly two centuries of data. Americans gave an estimated $592.5 billion to charity in 2024, the largest sum the Giving USA Foundation has ever recorded, with roughly two-thirds coming directly from individuals. The United States supplies approximately 40 percent of all global humanitarian assistance. The difference between American generosity and European generosity is not one of character but of architecture: the European model channels solidarity through taxation and the welfare state, while the American model channels it through voluntary association, precisely as the founders intended and Tocqueville foresaw.

The seventh reason is that America leads the world in the sustained, bipartisan, and unrelenting prosecution of the war on terror, a campaign whose origins predate September 11, 2001 by two centuries. In 1801, President Thomas Jefferson dispatched the newly established navy to confront the Barbary pirates of North Africa, terror-sponsoring states that had extorted over one million dollars annually in tribute from the United States government. The war concluded in 1815 under President James Madison, marking the first time in history that a Western power refused permanent submission to terrorist appeasement. In the modern era, Osama bin Laden was eliminated under President Obama in 2011, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Qasem Soleimani under President Trump in 2019, and Ayman al-Zawahiri under President Biden in 2022, a sustained bipartisan campaign spanning over two decades. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, a joint military campaign that opened with nearly 900 strikes in the first twelve hours and achieved the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the man who had led Iran's terror-sponsoring regime since 1989. Sustained American pressure subsequently forced Iran's hand on the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which a substantial share of the world's oil flows, after Tehran closed it during the 2026 war. From the shores of Tripoli to the office of Ayatollah Khamenei, the United States has never permanently yielded to Islamic terrorism, and no other nation on earth can make that claim.

The eighth reason is that the very existence of America required the overcoming of historical odds so formidable that its birth cannot be regarded as inevitable. China, under Admiral Zheng He, commanded the most powerful naval fleet in the world between 1405 and 1433, possessing, as law and public policy professor Ted Stewart documents in Seven Miracles That Saved America, the capacity for movable type, natural gas, smallpox inoculation, and oceanic circumnavigation while Europe was still copying scripture by hand. Had the Ming Dynasty not abandoned those voyages in 1433, and had China reached the Americas first, the Confucian administrative tradition, which political scientist Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations identified as placing authority, order, and the collectivity above the individual, would have shaped the New World instead of Magna Carta, Locke's natural rights philosophy, and Montesquieu's doctrine of separated powers. Within the American Revolution itself, George Washington commanded a chronically underfunded, undersupplied, and outmanned Continental Army, personally suppressed an officers' coup at Newburgh in 1783, and was the indispensable presence at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, whose delegates had conditioned their attendance on his. Remove Washington from the equation, and neither the Revolution nor the Constitution survives in the form that produced the republic we commemorate today.

Two hundred and fifty years of evidence constitute a verdict. The question Obama's 2009 remark implicitly raised, whether American exceptionalism is merely a sentiment indistinguishable from what any nation believes about itself, does not survive the historical record above. British exceptionalism does not include 238 years of unbroken constitutional operation. Greek exceptionalism does not include a founding creed that naturalizes any person on earth as a citizen. No nation's claim to exceptionalism includes all eight of the documented distinctions enumerated above. The record speaks for itself, and on July 4, 2026, we do not merely celebrate it. We inherit it.

Long live our brave soldiers!

Long live the Republic of the United States of America!

Note: The full version of this commentary can be accessed by clicking on this link.

The post The 250th Anniversary & Final Case for American Exceptionalism first appeared on Marcial's Law.

7-4-26

My friends and American countrymen, we rightly celebrate George Washington as the founder of our republic, the father of our Constitution, and the architect of the American presidency. Yet we rarely pause to consider the more unsettling truth that underlies each of these achievements: he should not have survived long enough to accomplish any of them. The historical record documents, across three decades of military service and multiple theaters of combat, a pattern of close encounters with death so extraordinary that Washington's own contemporaries struggled to explain it in purely natural terms. I submit to you that this record deserves careful examination, not to inflate legend, but because the evidence itself is remarkable.

The first and most thoroughly documented of these encounters occurred on July 9, 1755, at the Battle of the Monongahela in present-day western Pennsylvania. Washington, then a 23-year-old colonel serving as a volunteer aide-de-camp to British Major General Edward Braddock, rode continuously across the field of a catastrophic ambush, delivering orders under conditions that killed or wounded sixty of the eighty-six British officers present by the battle's third hour. Two horses were shot from beneath him. Four bullets passed through his coat and hat. Every other British officer on horseback was shot. Braddock himself was mortally wounded and dead within four days. Washington survived without a scratch. In a letter to his brother John Augustine Washington dated July 18, 1755, preserved by George Washington's Mount Vernon from the Founders Online at the National Archives, Washington wrote: "By the all-powerful dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability and expectation; for I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet escaped unhurt, altho' death was levelling my companions on every side." Dr. James Craik, Washington's physician and eyewitness, later told Washington's early biographer John Marshall that "I expected every moment to see him fall. His duty and situation exposed him to every danger. Nothing but the superintending care of Providence could have saved him from the fate of all around him."

Washington's second major encounter with death occurred on January 3, 1777, at the Battle of Princeton, New Jersey. The Continental Army, already exhausted from the overnight crossing of the Delaware and the surprise attack at Trenton eight days earlier, was on the verge of collapse when General Hugh Mercer's brigade was overrun and Mercer himself was mortally wounded. Washington rode forward on a large white horse, conspicuous against the field, to within thirty yards of the British lines (well within effective musket range) to rally his disintegrating troops. According to George Washington's Mount Vernon, Washington called out to his soldiers: "Parade with us my brave fellows! There is but a handful of the enemy and we shall have them directly!" His aide-de-camp John Fitzgerald reportedly pulled his hat over his eyes, expecting to see the General shot from the saddle at any moment. Both sides fired simultaneously at close range, filling the field with smoke. Historian W.J. Wood writes that "Colonel John Fitzgerald of [Washington's] staff covered his eyes so that he would not see his commander blasted from the saddle. Yet when the smoke began to clear, there was Washington, standing in his stirrups, calmly waving his men forward." The British broke and ran. Washington, untouched, shouted after them, "It's a fine fox chase, boys!" — a remark recorded by Mount Vernon and the American Battlefield Trust from contemporaneous accounts.

What is one to make of this evidence? The record establishes that upon at least five occasions when in great danger from gunfire, Washington remained unscathed — his hat was shot off his head, his clothes were torn, horses were killed beneath him, but he was never so much as scratched by a bullet, and for this immunity he consistently thanked Providence. Mount Vernon's own scholars have examined the so-called 'Indian Prophecy' — the account of an Indigenous chief who allegedly declared after the Monongahela battle that his men had fired repeatedly at Washington and missed, concluding that a spirit shielded him. Those scholars have determined that the legend as fully told by Washington's step-grandson George Washington Parke Custis in the 1820s almost certainly did not unfold precisely as described. What is not disputed, however, is that Washington escaped serious harm in a battle that killed nearly every officer around him, and that this feat, combined with his later prominence, was seen as remarkable, if not miraculous, by his contemporaries, and perhaps, even by Washington himself. The verified facts require no embellishment: on a battlefield that killed nearly every officer around him, and before a British firing line thirty yards distant, Washington was not struck. The historical record does not require a legend to produce astonishment. The record itself is sufficient.

My friends and American countrymen, we have in previous commentaries documented the five great junctures at which Washington's choices preserved the republic — Valley Forge, Trenton, Newburgh, Annapolis, and the presidency itself. What the evidence above adds to that argument is this: at two of those junctures, the republic's survival depended not only on Washington's willingness to act, but on his survival under conditions that should, by every calculation of probability, have produced his death. Had a bullet at the Monongahela in 1755 killed an obscure colonial colonel twenty years before the Revolution, there would have been no commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, no Newburgh Address, no voluntary resignation at Annapolis, and no presidency to define. Had a British musket ball at Princeton in 1777 struck the man thirty yards from its muzzle, the Continental Army might not have survived the winter of 1777, and the republic it was fighting to establish might have expired before it could be constituted. The indispensable man was, by the evidence of his own battles, a man who should not have been there to be indispensable.

Long live the spirit of George Washington and long live the Republic of the United States of America!

The post George Washington’s Close Encounters with Death first appeared on Marcial's Law.

7/2/2026

My friends and American countrymen, in 2009, President Barack Obama was asked whether he believed in American exceptionalism. "I believe in American exceptionalism," he answered, "just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." He went on, in the same remarks, to affirm America's "extraordinary role in leading the world toward peace and prosperity." The qualifying comparison, however, contained a philosophical claim worth examining on its own terms: that exceptionalism is merely a sentiment every nation holds about itself, with no nation's claim more documented or more verifiable than another's. That claim does not survive scrutiny. British exceptionalism rests on Magna Carta and parliamentary tradition; Greek exceptionalism rests on the legacy of Athenian philosophy and democracy. Neither nation can claim, as the evidence herein will show, an unbroken constitutional order of 238 years, a founding creed that naturalizes any man on Earth as a citizen, or two centuries of unrelenting resistance to terrorism stretching from the Barbary Coast to the present day. Whether the sentiment is sincere or merely diplomatic is not the question. The question is whether the claim is true, and on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of America's Declaration of Independence, the historical record answers it.

1. America is a paragon of liberty. 

Liberty in America takes several distinct forms, each with its own evidentiary record: political liberty, in which sovereignty flows from the people rather than a crown; religious liberty, secured against the kind of persecution that consumed Europe for centuries; liberty regardless of race, which survived the nation's founding compromise with slavery and ultimately triumphed over it; economic liberty, which built the most productive nation in history; and the liberty that America's military has, at great cost and with relative restraint, extended to others abroad.

First and foremost, America’s government is the world's first to be based on natural law and the principle that sovereignty emanates from the people, not from the monarchy or the government. That is in direct contrast to the theocratic concept of the "Divine Right of Kings,” which has pervaded the world for millennia until the American Revolution.  “Instead of rights and privileges flowing ‘down’ from the king,” states political historian Dinesh D’Souza, “they now flow ‘up’ from the people to the government.”  He further elaborates:

In the old case, the king granted limited authority and power to their rulers.  Elsewhere, the people are subjects and thus subjected to the laws, possessing rights only at the behest of the government.  In America, there are no subjects, only citizens.  Citizens are subject only to laws that they themselves make through their elected representatives.  The representatives possess this power at the behest of the people, and they must obey the same laws as the rest of the people.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon Wood reinforces this point, arguing in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Vintage, 1993) that the founding represented nothing less than the destruction of the ancient assumption that some men were born to rule and others to obey. "The Revolution," Wood writes, "was the most radical and most far-reaching event in American history." What made it radical was not battlefield victory but the wholesale dismantling of a social order in which birth, blood, and title determined one's place. For the first time in modern history, a government was constructed on the premise that no man was inherently superior to another — a premise so self-evident to Americans today that its revolutionary audacity is almost entirely forgotten.

This was no accident of rhetoric. Historian Bernard Bailyn, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, demonstrates that the founders' invocation of natural rights reflected a deeply constructed political philosophy — assembled from decades of reading Locke, Cicero, the English Whigs, and Montesquieu. The founders did not merely declare that rights were natural; they engineered an entire governmental architecture to protect those rights from the force history had proven most likely to destroy them: concentrated governmental power. The American founding was an act of deliberate intellectual design — not circumstance or accident.

That being said, the government of the world’s first modern constitutional republic (the U.S.A.) was not established to protect its own interests or even the interests of any one of its own branches independent of the people.  Nor was it framed to protect and perpetuate the privileged classes of dynasties, the wealthy, ecclesiastical, technocratic, or the intelligentsia.  Indeed, most of the founders who signed America’s Declaration of Independence essentially forfeited their money, property, and family in the cause for liberty---one from which they derived no economic profit.  Hence, President Abraham Lincoln aptly referred to the infant government as a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” a radical concept unheard of then and often taken for granted today.  It is also the reason the founders rejected “titles of nobility” in Article II, Section 9 of the Constitution, and was illustrated by the French statesman Alexis de Tocqueville when he visited America in 1831 and observed that even a waiter is often called “sir,” though he is not a knight.

Just as Americans sought refuge from political persecution in their pursuit of self-governance, so, too, did they seek freedom of religion and freedom from religious coercion by the state.   America’s founders scrutinized the history of religious persecution and abuse of political power among the great French and English empires, wherein only the religion of the despots was legally recognized, while religious minorities were oppressed, terrorized, or even executed.

For example, from 1533-1534, King Henry VIII of England severed ties with Pope Clement VII and the predominant state-sponsored Catholic Church in order to establish the Church of England of which he declared himself its “Supreme Head.”  As such, he outlawed papal authority, making any dissent of his title treasonous and punishable by death.  He seized vast lands and wealth of the Catholic estate, while destroying shrines to saints, and executing about 200 Catholic dissenters.

During France’s Reign of Terror (1793-1794) of National Convention leader Maximilian Robespierre, the deistic “Cult of the Supreme Being” was established, which was neither Catholic nor Protestant.  Since the Catholic Church represented the old regime, its members were the persecuted majority in that the clergy were imprisoned and executed, while the cathedrals were stripped of their religious symbols and repurposed for the state.  Protestants shared the same fate, since they were perceived as competing with state loyalty.  Finally, since Robespierre considered atheists to be immoral, they also became vulnerable to persecution and execution.

Cognizant that many Christians were fearful of such instances of a potentially oppressive national church or state-mandated religion under the new American government, President Thomas Jefferson assured them of the establishment of a “wall of the separation of church and state,” whereby the state could not hinder religious institutions or individuals with regard to religious beliefs, rituals, or practices.  Hence, the First Amendment of the Constitution asserts that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . .”

After all, the primary reason the Pilgrims and Puritans settled in America in the early 17^th century was to evade religious persecution in England.  Such religious liberty was one of a few factors that inspired the Great Migration in which approximately 20,000 Englishmen settled in America within a decade.  Religious liberty was so highly regarded by Jefferson that his authorship of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was one of three of his achievements engraved on his tombstone.

Even liberty for blacks was no exception, for their time came to pass in the event of the Civil War (in which 324,000 white soldiers died defending the freedom of blacks) and ratification of the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution (which abolished slavery).  Subsequent amendments and laws were passed to deinstitutionalize racism and racial discrimination, which included equal rights to citizenship, suffrage, public transportation, educational and employment opportunities in both the public and private sectors, and the abolition of apartheid.

For example, the Insurrection Act of 1807 and Enforcement Act of 1871 were invoked to allow the President to use military force against the Ku Klux Klan (the anti-black terrorist organization) to protect the civil rights of blacks.  This led to mass arrests and prosecutions of Klan members.  During racial integration of public schools and universities in the 1950s and 1960s, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy sent the national guard to several schools to protect the new black students.

Such anti-racist measures have been proven to be very effective in that blacks have not only been able to occupy positions traditionally held by whites, they have climbed the corporate ladder as CEOs, board directors, and major shareholders.  Many have become entrepreneurs, starting and growing small businesses.  They have excelled in media and entertainment.  They have occupied every branch of government---local and federal.  America’s first black president, Barack Obama, was elected in 2008 and re-elected in 2012 (a feat that would have been mathematically impossible without the white vote, thereby debunking the myth of America as a predominantly racist nation).  Even the second highest public office was presided over by America’s first black female vice president, Kamala Harris.

In a word, social progress in that the redress of racial grievances has been fairly swift and impactful since America’s founding.  Even the black liberal sociologist Orlando Patterson, who was born under British colonial rule in Jamaica, emphasizes this point:

America, while still flawed in its race relations, is now the least racist white majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or black; offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all of Africa; and has gone through a dramatic change in its attitudes toward miscegenation.

The naysayers may contend that all such redress of racial grievances and injustices are the result of reformers or public servants who lived long after America’s founders.  This may imply that not only are the founders unworthy of praise, but they may have even framed the Constitution embedding slavery and racial inequalities in the DNA of America.  Of course, that would be a plausible contention that America was, indeed, founded on the sin of slavery, or that its founders were pro-slavery.  However, history proves otherwise.

First and foremost, it is important to understand that declaring a universal truth is different from declaring it to be in full unimpeded operation at a particular time and place.  Circumstances at a given time may not permit a certain group or class of persons to freely exercise their natural rights and liberties.  President Abraham Lincoln made this clear in his rebuttal to pro-slavery Senator Stephen Douglass:

I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects . . . . They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in "certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.

Even the black civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stated that “when the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” and it was a “promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable rights’ of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”  Now that it is established that the founders understood the universality of natural rights, what follows are some of the measures they took to uphold such a self-evident truth.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, he condemned King George III for several grievances, one of which was slavery, stating:

He has waged cruel War against human Nature itself, violating its of Life and Liberty in the Persons of a distant People who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into Slavery in another Hemisphere, or to incur miserable Death, in their Transportation thither. This piratical Warfare, the opprobrium of infidel Powers, is the Warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.
He has prostituted his Negative for Suppressing every legislative Attempt to prohibit or to restrain an execrable Commerce, determined to keep open a Market where Men should be bought and sold, and that this assemblage of Horrors might want no Fact of distinguished Die.

Unfortunately, the dissenting committee members, who oversaw the draft, omitted it permanently from the adopted draft.  Regardless, the Declaration’s preamble asserts “that all men are created equal.”  It does not qualify a specific group or kind of men.  It clearly states “all men,” which would logically include blacks, would it not?

In Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, the Three-Fifths Clause states:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other Persons

This indicates that every five slaves will be counted as three people (three-fifths or 60% of the slave population) for purposes of representation in the House of Representatives.  The alternative would be to legally count one slave as a single person, and as such, would empower the slaveholding states further due to increased representation.  Hence, diminishing the slave population by two-fifths restricts the power of the slaveholding states.  As the abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass states:

I answer — It is a downright disability laid upon the slaveholding States; one which deprives those States of two-fifths of their natural basis of representation. A black man in a free State is worth just two-fifths more than a black man in a slave State, as a basis of political power under the Constitution. Therefore, instead of encouraging slavery, the Constitution encourages freedom by giving an increase of “two-fifths” of political power to free over slave States. So much for the three-fifths clause; taking it at is worst, it still leans to freedom, not slavery; for, be it remembered that the Constitution nowhere forbids a coloured man to vote.

Other anti-slavery measures included the 1787 Northwest Ordinance which outlawed slavery in the territory that would become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.  In 1807, President Thomas Jefferson signed into law a bill that outlawed the importation of slaves.  Of the thirteen original states, five either abolished slavery outright or were trending towards abolition by the time the Constitution was signed in 1787.  Among them were Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.  Although Vermont was not one of the original states, it was the first territory to outlaw slavery in 1777.  Additionally, Benjamin Franklin co-founded a Philadelphia abolitionist organization, and George Washington willed all of his slaves free upon his death.

Furthermore, it is clear that not all of America’s founders supported slavery or its perpetuation.  All things considered, it seems grossly unfair to condemn all the founders as pro slavery or to assert that America’s government was founded on slavery in light of the anti-slavery policies legislated by various states and the federal government.

Perhaps skeptics or naysayers may then question why the anti-slavery founders did not simply reject slavery outright at the 1787 Constitutional Convention.  My answer is politics, which sometimes necessitates short-term compromises in order to secure long-term gains.  Political historian Dinesh D’Souza elaborates:

So the choice facing the founders in Philadelphia was not whether to have slavery or not.  Rather, it was whether to have a union that temporarily tolerated slavery, or to have no union at all.  The continent of North America might then have become an amalgam of smaller nations---vulnerable to the depredations of foreign empires---and slavery might have continued longer than it actually did.

Just the fact that the anti-slavery founders had the foresight to engineer such a government that would severely restrict and facilitate the eventual demise of a perennial, universal institution, illustrates their remarkable prescience.  Hence, America’s history of slavery and racial injustices, in no way, undermines the nation’s exceptionalism.  On the contrary, the self-corrective mechanisms embedded in its founding documents only confirm it.  No other 18^th century government can make that claim, not even contemporaneous empires like Britain, France, or Spain.

In America, liberty also extends to the economic sphere in that, as economist Milton Friedman stated, “it prevents one person from interfering with another in respect of most of his activities.”  He further elaborates:

The consumer is protected from coercion by the seller because of the presence of other sellers with whom he can deal.  The seller is protected from coercion by the consumer because of other consumers to whom he can sell.  The employee is protected from coercion by the employer because of other employers for whom he can work, and so on.

In other words, a centralized authority does not exist to govern such an autonomous arrangement of various competitors.  Instead, the entire system is regulated by what economist Adam Smith, in his pioneering work, The Wealth of Nations, dubbed “the invisible hand of the market,” otherwise known as the free market system or capitalism.  What makes it unique to America is that the nation was the first to frame a legal system built on market principles enshrined in the Constitution, which is why we are also celebrating, alongside America’s 250 years of independence, the publishing of Smith’s book in 1776.

Additionally, while free market capitalism developed only partially or with feudalistic restrictions in Europe (whereby upward social mobility was stagnant due to class rigidity imposed by an established aristocracy), full-fledged capitalism developed in America with respect to the individual rights of “the common, ordinary man” without an aristocracy of nobility coupled with the elements of low taxation, minimal regulations, secure property rights, and strong patent and copyright protections, essentially allowing upward social mobility to anyone of any class and encouraging new inventions and technology.

The results were not merely theoretical.  Economic historian Angus Maddison, whose reconstruction of global GDP data remains the authoritative benchmark for pre-modern economic history, calculated that between 1800 and 1900, average global income nearly doubled (rising from approximately $1,140 to $2,180 per person annually).  Yet America did not merely keep pace with that global trend; it surpassed it so decisively that by the close of the 19th century, the United States had overtaken Great Britain (the world's previous economic leader) in both GDP per capita and labor productivity, which was a gap that would only widen further into the 20th century.  No nation in history had risen so far, so fast, within a single constitutional framework built explicitly to protect economic liberty.

Nor was this prosperity accidental.  The founders encoded innovation into the Constitution itself.  Article I, Section 8 empowered Congress to secure "for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,” the only clause in the Constitution where the framers took the unusual step of specifying not merely a power, but its explicit purpose.  The Patent Act was signed into law in April 1790, just one year after ratification.  In that first year, 3 patents were granted. By 1830, that annual figure had grown to 544. By 1900, the United States had issued a cumulative 640,000 patents (a figure that prompted a former Prime Minister of Great Britain, perhaps the most industrially advanced nation of the era, to observe that "in no one country, I suppose, is there so careful a cultivation of the inventive faculty.")  From the cotton gin to the telegraph to the lightbulb, the constitutional protection of intellectual property was the invisible scaffolding beneath America's century of invention.

Even in the modern era, America has the comparative advantage due to the entrepreneurial traits of risk-taking, ambition, and self-promotion being entrenched in the national culture, whereas economic equality and economic security are valued more than economic liberty in Western Europe (hence, higher taxes, more regulations, bigger safety net).  Likewise, the world’s brightest minds are nurtured in the most prestigious institutions of innovation like MIT, Caltech, and Silicon Valley.  Finally, starting a business in the country that provided the world with the assembly line, the internet, and the smartphone inspires consumer trust, enhances credibility, and facilitates access to international markets.

With regard to upward social mobility, in Rage and the Republic (Simon & Schuster, 2026), political commentator Jonathan Turley cites a recent study of wealthy individuals in the Forbes 400 with these findings:

. . . in 2011, only 32 percent came from wealthy families---down from 60 percent in 1982.  Twenty percent came from poor families, and the majority did not inherit a family business.  Roughly 70 percent started their own businesses (up from 40 percent in 1982).  In 2019, another study found that 79 percent of millionaires were self-made.

As a result, America has quickly become a prosperous nation, so much so that it can and does expand its wealth abroad in the form of jobs, goods and services, and foreign aid.  “More people have been lifted out of poverty by capitalism,” states Ambassador Mike Huckabee, “than any other economic system ever to appear in the history of the world.  This is a proven fact and it is a primary reason why the United States is a superpower that has blessed the rest of the world with its innovations and generosity when need has arisen.”

In addition to defending liberty within its own borders, America has utilized the world’s most powerful military for the defense of other free nations and the spread of liberty in others enveloped in a tyrannical government.  In 1950, the U.S. sent troops to Korea to prevent the communists from dominating the entire peninsula.  The result was an independent South Korea in which hundreds of American troops are stationed to guard against a potential North Korean invasion until today.  Related to the Korean conflict, the U.S. has provided military defense for Taiwan against the People’s Republic of China.  (Perhaps you should express gratitude for your smartphone or laptop and their AI chips.)  In 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the U.S. led a 42-country coalition to liberate it and restore its independence.  During the Serbian “ethnic cleansing” massacre of thousands of Muslim ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1999, the U.S. led NATO on a bombing campaign to quash Serbian forces, eventually leading to Kosovo’s independence from Serbia.

What all such military missions share in common is America’s benevolence in preserving and spreading liberty globally without colonial annexation or even usurping natural resources from the aforementioned countries, unlike other historical great powers.  As I pointed out in The Full Ledger: Why America Remains the Philippines’ Greatest Ally, it could be argued (as an exception) that the U.S. annexed the Philippines without its consent in 1898.  However, the former educated Filipinos, taught them English, fought alongside them against the Japanese imperialists, and assisted them in establishing their own constitution for self-governance, which eventually led to their independence from the U.S. on July 4, 1946.  By stark contrast, the Philippines’ former colonial power, Spain, ruled the islands for over 300 years and left no such democratic infrastructure to speak of.

In spite of the aforementioned U.S. military missions, as well as numerous others not mentioned, it is notable that military expenditures have remained below 4% annually.  According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (the globally recognized benchmark for defense expenditure data), U.S. military spending in recent peacetime years has hovered between 3 and 4 percent of GDP: in 1999 it reached a post-Cold War low of 3.09 percent; in 2019, despite spending $732 billion (nearly as much as the next ten nations combined), it amounted to just 3.4 percent of GDP; and in 2025 it stood at approximately 3 percent.

By contrast, Russia devotes 7.1 percent of its GDP to its military, and Ukraine, in wartime, has committed 39.6 percent. The reason America can project unmatched global power at a comparatively modest fiscal burden is the same reason it surpassed Great Britain as the world's leading economy by 1900: the free market system (economic liberty enshrined in its Constitution) generates a productive base so vast that military supremacy becomes, in relative terms, economically sustainable.  That accounts for the nation’s relative safety and security from foreign invaders by a mighty and exceptionally advanced military apparatus.  (U.S. is the only nation with stealth bombers, deep bunker buster bombs, and Space Force which played a critical role in intercepting Iran’s ballistic missiles during Operation Epic Fury.)

In summary, political commentator Dennis Prager elucidates the role of America with regard to liberty:

It was the country that most inspired other countries to be free.  It is the country that has been free the longest. . . More people from more countries have immigrated to America in order to be free than to the rest of the world’s countries put together.  More black Africans have immigrated to the United States voluntarily---looking for freedom and opportunity---than came to the United States involuntary as slaves. . . The fact is that America has been the greatest model of liberty, the greatest spreader of liberty, and the greatest preserver of liberty the world has ever known.

Perhaps the most credible verdicts are those rendered not by partisans, but by witnesses: Orlando Patterson, the black Jamaican-born Harvard scholar of slavery, who declares in The Ordeal of Integration (Basic Books, 1998) that America is "the least racist white-majority society in the world"; black civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who acknowledged that the Declaration's universal natural rights constituted "a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir"; and Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist and former slave, who revered the U.S. Constitution and dubbed it "a glorious liberty document."  Indeed, their testimony is that of witnesses, not partisans, and any competent attorney will affirm that witnesses provide the most persuasive evidence of all.  I rest my case.

2. America's Constitution has been in continuous operation for 238 years.

The average national constitution lasts 17 years, a figure calculated by political scientists Zachary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg, and James Melton in their landmark study The Endurance of National Constitutions (Cambridge University Press, 2009).  That single arithmetic fact may be the most concise summary of American exceptionalism ever produced.

Constitutional law professor Hugh Hewitt captures why:

The work of collective genius that is the Constitution has been tested by everything from an actual civil war that claimed 600,000 lives to various panics, two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Great Recession, not to mention impeachments and assassinations, political-judicial meltdowns like Florida in 2000, and dozens of scandals---and it does not break.  It is more resilient than any other modern constitution, a remarkable, nearly perfect balance of competing powers and separated authorities that has endured and will endure.  Those who fear it is off the road and in the ditch have to ignore history’s many examples of America righting itself after trauma and setback.

Yale constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar, whose book entitled America's Constitution: A Biography (Yale University Press, 2005), remains the definitive academic treatment of the document, reinforces Hewitt’s assessment, noting that the Constitution's genius lies not in its rigidity but in its capacity to absorb conflict through amendment, interpretation, and institutional adaptation rather than replacement.

The historical record of other nations throws this achievement into sharp relief.  The Philippines, which has operated under 7 constitutions since 1899, offers a particularly instructive contrast: each charter change has followed a period of political rupture, from the Marcos dictatorship to the EDSA revolution to the ongoing debates over federalism. By contrast, the American Constitution has absorbed comparable pressures: a civil war, two world wars, a Great Depression, and presidential assassinations, which never resulted in the national charter’s replacement. Each constitutional replacement represents not merely a legal revision but a fundamental collapse of political order.

That America has experienced only one such reset in 238 years, while France has experienced 15, Germany 4, China 8, Greece 10, Venezuela 25, and Haiti 21, is not coincidence. It is the compounding dividend of founders who, as historian Bernard Bailyn demonstrated, designed their governmental architecture with a deliberate, historically informed understanding of how republics fail and built the mechanisms to prevent it.

Hence, constitutional stability is not merely a legal achievement.  It is the precondition for every other liberty described above, e.g., the freedom of religion, the free market, the protection of civil rights, and the projection of military power in defense of others. Without the document, none of the rest follows.

3. Anyone can become an American, but not vice-versa.

Indeed, no American can become a Filipino, a Nigerian, a Mexican, or a Russian in the same way virtually any one of those nationals or ethnic groups can become an American.  Throughout history, virtually all societies (whether tribes or countries) had a national or group identity correlated with its ethnic or racial identity.  Such groups were further divided by blood and marital bonds.  Hence, employers (often distrustful of non-blood relations) generally offered jobs and other opportunities to family members (being of the same race or ethnicity), unlike in America.

In fact, America was one of the first nations, if not exclusively the first nation, to deviate from this historical norm by de-emphasizing nationality, ethnicity, family, and bloodline in favor of individual worth or individual achievement---one of the country’s most cherished values.  That is why, as political commentator Dennis Prager states, “A third-generation Turk in Germany, born in Germany, fluent and accentless in German, is rarely considered a German by other Germans.  In America, however, a first-generation Turk who is not fluent in English and speaks with a distinct accent is considered an American by other Americans.”

This is due to America’s motto, E Pluribus Unum, which is a rare governing principle with no true parallel, translated literally from Latin as “from many, one.”  That is to say, from the assimilation of diverse ethnicities, nationalities, and cultures, is a unified nation, namely, the United States of America.  Members of such groups need simply adopt the American creed.

Political scientist Samuel Huntington defined the American creed as the embodiment of “liberty, equality, individualism, representative government, and private property” and argued that “millions of immigrants and their children achieved wealth, power, and status in American society precisely because they assimilated themselves into the prevailing American culture.”  Two examples include the founder of Carnegie Steel Company, Andrew Carnegie, who was born in Scotland and co-founder of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, who was born in Soviet Ukraine.  Perhaps the most striking example of immigrant assimilation is illustrated by Prager in explaining why “God Bless America---probably the American people’s favorite national song and its unofficial anthem---could be written by a Russian Jewish immigrant named Israel Isidore Baline, aka Irving Berlin,“ and “he felt as American as someone whose ancestors came to America on the Mayflower.”  Hence, my point remains that anyone can become American, and that no other nation can make the same claim.

4. America’s government has a unique system of checks and balances, whose methodology is based on the historical rise and fall of tyrannical governments, rather than a mere theory of self-governance. 

Indeed, the founders scrutinized the world’s governing systems---ancient and contemporary, along with great thinkers as Socrates, Cicero, John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, and William Blackstone.  The civilizations included Greece, Rome, France, and England from which the founders derived the concepts of liberty, justice, trial by jury, separation of powers, federalism, democracy, republicanism, and self-government.  The founders were informed by their own tyrannical experience with King George III as well.

For example, the French political philosopher, Montesquieu (1689 – 1755), studied Rome and France in which power was concentrated in the former’s dictator (Julius Caesar) and the latter’s monarch (King Louis XIV).  He concluded, “When legislative power is united with executive power in a single person or in a simple body of magistracy, there is no liberty, because one can fear that the same monarch or senate that makes tyrannical laws will execute them tyrannically.”  In Federalist 47, James Madison echoed Montesquieu when he stated that “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Of course, the obvious remedy for such a concentration of power was mixed government.  Aristotle first derived the idea from his study of ancient constitutions, arguing in his Politics that a stable republic must blend monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements to prevent any single faction from seizing total control.  Polybius then applied the theory to Rome in his Histories, identifying the Roman Republic's consuls, Senate, and popular assemblies as precisely that balance and crediting it for Rome's rise to greatness.  Cicero absorbed Polybius and elaborated the argument in De Re Publica, where he defended the mixed constitution as the form of government most consistent with natural law and human reason.  In turn, that work reached America's founders directly: John Adams cited Cicero extensively in his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States, and Madison's notes from the Constitutional Convention reflect the same classical inheritance.

The founders also rejected democracies, since they empower the majority without protecting the minority.  Madison perceived such an arrangement of power as “mob rule” or even as “tyranny of the majority,” which is just as pernicious, if not more so, than the rule of aristocracy or an elite, since it simply entails provoking an emotionally charged crowd (whether of the legislative body or a massive jury) into rash action.  Consider Socrates’s condemnation to death in 399 BCE by jurors who also happened to be legislators.  A massive jury of 500 members serving a dual role, bereft of any check on its whims or bias, was inherently vulnerable to emotional manipulation.

Another example entails eight generals in 406 BC.  During their naval victory of the Battle of Arginusae, a storm prevented them from rescuing shipwrecked sailors.  Consequently, the infuriated Athenian assembly voted to try and immediately execute all eight generals for their alleged negligence.  Clearly, the single, unchecked body acted impulsively, rather than rationally.  There were other cases elsewhere which is why in Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts: How the Ancients Inspired the Founding Fathers (Rowman & Rittlefield, 2009), the classical historian Carl Richard stated, “the founders learned to see Athens as the epitome of the democratic state, a chronically unstable, often hellish, society controlled by violent and erratic mobs that frequently executed their nation’s best citizens on the flimsiest of grounds.”

That is why the founders divided Congress into a bicameral chamber.  The founders criticized Greece’s unicameral legislature due to its unstable, democratic character.  They pointed out that a unicameral legislature expressed the unruly passions and whims of the people at a given time, and was hence, short-lived and fickle.  For that reason, the Senate was a check on the House.  As I cited George Washington from my federalism commentary, “we pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it” from the “hot” chamber of the House of Representatives.

Aside from the founders' structural ingenuity in the checks and balances and separation of powers at the federal level (horizontal power), they also confronted a problem that had destroyed every prior confederation in history: how to balance the power of a central government against the sovereignty of its member states (vertical power) without the whole collapsing into either tyranny or anarchy, namely, the engineering of federalism.

The founders perceived the Amphictyonic League in ancient Greece to be a failed model, since its central council lacked the power to implement its laws on the individual city-states, leading to internal conflict and the Peloponnesian War.  Other rejected examples include the Swiss Confederation and the Dutch Republic due to the former’s weak executive and lack of shared national identity (making it vulnerable to foreign manipulation) and the latter’s mandatory unanimity in public policy, rather than majority rule with protections for the minority.

However, the founders favorably viewed the Lycian Confederacy model.  It consisted of a federation of 23 city-states in what is now southwestern Turkey, operated from roughly the 1st century BC into the Roman period. Its system of proportional representation allocating votes in the federal assembly according to the size of each city was most impressive to Montesquieu, who cited it in The Spirit of the Laws as the model federal republic. Madison cited Montesquieu's endorsement in Federalist 9. The institutional DNA of the Lycian Confederacy, transmitted through Montesquieu to Madison, is traceable in Article I of the U.S. Constitution, which empowered the U.S. as a great empire (e.g., national defense, currency, interstate commerce), while preserving the autonomy and sovereignty of the individual states (e.g., local policing, education, property law).

Furthermore, as classical historian Carl Richard argues in The Founders and the Classics (Harvard University Press, 1994), the founders' deep study of Greek and Roman history was not merely ornamental. It was operational — a systematic effort to identify the precise mechanisms by which free republics had failed, and to engineer constitutional barriers against each of them. Athens fell to the mob; Rome fell to the dictator; Britain fell to the monarch. The Constitution was designed, with historical precision, to prevent all three, which is one of the features of American exceptionalism.

5. Among modern constitutional republics and large nation-states, America’s government has been the world’s first to sustain a tradition of the peaceful transition of power from one head of state to his successor, regardless of political or personal animosity between them (unlike in Greece, Rome, France, or England). 

Historically, transitions of power in empires---both ancient and modern---have been violent, sanguinary, or tyrannical.  For example, in 44 BCE, the Roman dictator, Julius Caesar, was assassinated by a group of rival senators that stabbed him 23 times.  Civil war ensued after which two of Caesar’s assassination conspirators committed suicide, and Caesar’s great nephew, Octavian, became the first official emperor of Rome, converting it from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire.

In 1649, King Charles I of England was overthrown and beheaded by Lt. General Oliver Cromwell, who replaced the monarchy with a republic and presided as its next head of state---“Lord Protector,” until his death from urinary tract infection or kidney disease in 1658.  Ironically, after the monarchy was restored in 1660 with King Charles II (only 2 years after Cromwell’s death), he ordered Cromwell’s corpse be exhumed, hanged, and beheaded as a symbolic act of vengeance on the 12^th anniversary of the execution of his father, Charles I.  Cromwell’s severed head was placed on a pike to be displayed in Westminster Hall for the next 20 years.

In 1793, King Louis XVI of France was violently overthrown and guillotined, and the power of the monarchy devolved to the legislative body called the National Convention, which was dominated by Maximilien Robespierre.

By contrast, America’s first two heads of state have deviated from this pattern in the transfer of power.  After George Washington served his last presidential term and resumed his simple farming life, King George III styled him “the most distinguished of any man living” and the “greatest character of the age.”  This was a reflection at that point in history of the incomprehensibility of a head of state voluntarily giving up power.  Incidentally, this act symbolized Washington’s virtue and the political reality of the U.S.A. as a republic, not a monarchy.

Similarly, when President John Adams ran for a second term in the 1800 presidential election against his personal and political rival, Thomas Jefferson (and lost), Adams proceeded to attend his inauguration, regardless of personal animosity.  This established the precedent for America’s long tradition of transferring power peacefully from one head of state to his successor for other democratic countries to emulate.  More importantly, the contrast between the two rivals’ personal hostility and their institutional behavior is the exact point that distinguishes America from the preceding examples.

6. America has historically been the most charitable nation. 

Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the United States in 1831, observed that Americans of every age, condition, and disposition perpetually formed voluntary associations to accomplish what Europeans left to the state.  Nearly two centuries later, the figures vindicate his observation.  Americans gave an estimated $592.5 billion to charity in 2024, the largest sum the Giving USA report has ever recorded, of which roughly two-thirds came from individuals directly and nearly three-quarters once their bequests are counted.

The American nonprofit sector remains the largest in the world.  More than one in four Americans, some 28 percent, formally volunteered through an organization in 2023, while a majority assisted their neighbors informally. No comparable nation sustains a private philanthropic culture of this scale.

The contrast with Europe is instructive, though it must be drawn with precision.  Measured in dollars per capita, the American gives more than his European counterpart; the United Kingdom, America's nearest rival, records a higher share of citizens who report donating in a given year, yet does not approach the American total.  The difference is not that Europeans are less generous by nature, but that the European model channels solidarity through taxation and the welfare state, while the American model channels it through voluntary association, precisely as Tocqueville foresaw.

The same distinction governs the foreign-aid record.  The United States supplies the largest volume of humanitarian assistance in the world, accounting for roughly 40 percent of all humanitarian aid tracked in 2024, even as it commits a smaller share of its national income to official government aid than the Nordic states do.  American generosity has always been private before it was governmental, and associational before it was bureaucratic.  That is not a deficiency.  It is the founding premise, and it is what political scientist Samuel Huntington, in his own framework, was reaching for when he tried to name what distinguishes America.

7. America leads the world in the war on terror.

Perhaps, it is noteworthy to recall when America’s original “war on terror” occurred in the nation’s infancy in 1801.  Prior to that year, American merchants sailed the high seas to the Mediterranean, wherein Islamic terrorists (also known as Barbary pirates) from Algeria, Tunisia, Tripoli, and Morocco seized their ships and cargo and ransomed the crew.  As a result, the U.S. government complied and even paid annual tribute (essentially bribe money of over $1 million) to keep further piracy at bay in order to “protect” future merchants.  During President Thomas Jefferson’s term, the newly-established navy (America depended on the British navy before its independence) was sent to battle the terror-sponsoring states in a war which successfully ended after 14 years under President James Madison’s term in 1815.  Consequently, those North African states signed a peace treaty, effectively abolishing further ransoms and bribery payments, and marked the first time in history that a Western power refused to succumb to terrorist appeasement.

More recently, justice for the victims of Islamic terrorism has been exacted in the targeted elimination of Osama Bin Laden (founder of al-Qaeda & mastermind of the September 11 attacks in 2001), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (ISIS leader), Ayman al-Zawahiri (Bin Laden’s successor), and Qasem Soleimani (commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is responsible for Iran’s foreign proxy terrorist network).

These eliminations were not isolated acts of retribution, but rather a sustained, bipartisan campaign spanning over two decades across multiple presidential administrations: Bin Laden under Obama in 2011, al-Baghdadi and Soleimani under Trump in 2019, and al-Zawahiri under Biden in 2022.  This demonstrates that American resolve against Islamic terrorism does not expire with any single election cycle, a resolve that, as history demonstrates, traces its origins not to September 11, 2001, but to the shores of Tripoli two centuries prior.

In 2025, U.S. Central Command led partner forces in Syria to strike over 100 ISIS infrastructure and weapons site targets, captured over 300 ISIS operatives, and killed over 20. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, a joint military campaign against the Iranian regime, opening with nearly 900 strikes in the first twelve hours alone. The campaign's opening strike achieved what two decades of sanctions and diplomacy had not: the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the man who had ruled Iran's terror-sponsoring state since 1989. By the time the campaign concluded on May 5, 2026, it had dealt the regime's military and nuclear infrastructure a blow from which it has yet to recover.

Sustained American pressure, military and diplomatic alike, also forced Iran's hand on the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which a substantial share of the world's oil flows. After Tehran closed the strait amid the 2026 war, President Trump issued repeated ultimatums demanding its reopening, warning that continued closure would invite further destruction of Iran's infrastructure. Over the following months, through a mix of American military pressure, economic strain on the Iranian regime, and diplomatic mediation (including from Pakistan), Iran moved by stages toward reopening the strait, though compliance remained halting and incomplete even as late as June 2026. Whatever one's final judgment of how completely the waterway has reopened, the basic dynamic is plain: it was American resolve, not Iranian goodwill, that placed Tehran under the pressure to relent in the first place.  Indubitably, from the shores of Tripoli to the office of Ayatollah Khamenei, the United States has never permanently yielded to Islamic terrorism nor allowed a hostile regime to choke off the world's commerce, and no other nation on earth can make that claim.

8. The overwhelming odds against America’s birth were decisively overcome.

For example, China very nearly became the civilization to project power across the world's oceans before any European fleet did, only to abandon that role and leave its consequences, including the eventual encounter with the Americas, to Europe. The disparity in advancement was not trivial. As law and public policy professor Ted Stewart observes in Seven Miracles That Saved America (Shadow Mountain, 2009), while medieval Europe was still copying scripture by hand and burning whale oil for light, China had already developed movable type, exploited natural gas, inoculated against smallpox, and built fleets capable of circumnavigating the world.

That capacity found its fullest expression in Admiral Zheng He, who commanded the most formidable naval force in the world between 1405 and 1433.  Emperor Zhu Di, whose expansionist ambitions had already extended Chinese imperial reach across Southeast Asia, India, Arabia, and the East African coast, provided him both the mandate and the means to project power further still. Yet the Ming Dynasty ultimately abandoned those voyages and turned inward. The decision carried practical causes, including the enormous cost of the fleets relative to their tribute-based returns and a long-running rivalry between the eunuch faction Zheng He served and the Confucian scholar-bureaucracy that resented their influence, but it was the Confucian court officials' argument, that China was self-sufficient and that the world existed to serve it on its own terms, which ultimately prevailed and left the Americas to be reached by others. That philosophical premise, that the state is supreme and individuals exist to serve its harmony rather than the reverse, was neither new nor confined to the Ming court, yet the 1433 decision stands as one of its most consequential expressions, for it foreclosed, by deliberate choice rather than misfortune, the path that China alone among the powers of that era possessed the capacity to take.

As I stated in my commentary Could America Be a Province of China Without Christopher Columbus?, had Ming China carried that same expansionist will across the Pacific and become the civilization to shape the world's encounter with the New World, the intellectual inheritance that produced our founding documents would never have arrived on these shores, for the Declaration of Independence was not conjured from thin air but was the product of Magna Carta, John Locke's natural rights philosophy, Montesquieu's doctrine of separated powers, and one hundred and fifty years of colonial self-governance. None of these exist in the Confucian administrative tradition, where, as political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote in The Clash of Civilizations (Simon & Schuster, 1996), the emphasis on "authority, order, hierarchy, and supremacy of the collectivity over the individual, creates obstacles to democratization."

George Washington’s contribution to the existence of America is, in no way, less significant than Columbus’s.  What follows is excerpted from my commentary entitled Would America Exist Without George Washington?  During the American Revolution, Washington commanded a Continental Army that was chronically underfunded, perpetually undersupplied, constantly on the verge of dissolution (not to mention desertions), and outmanned by a well-equipped, professionally trained British army.  Regardless, he refused to abandon it. In March 1783, at Newburgh, New York, disgruntled revolutionary officers conspired to implement a coup d'état against the newly formed government for neglecting to compensate them for their military service. However, Washington persuaded them to abandon their planned mutiny.  At the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, the assembly came near collapse in June, when delegates from the smaller states, refusing a national legislature apportioned solely by population, threatened to walk out before the Connecticut Compromise secured their participation. Initially, the presence of the delegates was largely incumbent upon Washington’s anticipated attendance, which nearly did not occur, if not for James Madison’s persistent persuasion. Aside from Washington’s birth as an essential part of the American equation, the odds of his survival were quite slim, close to nil, since gunfire crossed his path on numerous occasions.  (I elaborate in George Washington’s Close Encounters with Death.)  Hence, while Columbus opened the western hemisphere to European contact, which forged centuries of English constitutional development and political thought in America, Washington is credited with the founding of America’s government and his virtuous restraint that made the republic survive (quelling of military mutiny to overthrow the government, refusal of a crown, voluntary resignation after two presidential terms).

Furthermore, the case for America’s exceptionalism has been made.  It would be wise that we continually reflect those points and contemplate our nation’s greatness and status, as Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story elucidates the significance of imparting its history to the youth:

If these Commentaries shall but inspire in the rising generation a more ardent love of their country, an unquenchable thirst for liberty, and a profound reverence for the constitution and the union, then they will have accomplished all that their author ought to desire. Let the American youth never forget that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors; and capable, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence. The structure has been erected by architects of consummate skill and fidelity; its foundations are solid; its compartments are beautiful as well as useful; its arrangements are full of wisdom and order; and its defences are impregnable from without. It has been reared for immortality, if the work of man may justly aspire to such a title. It may, nevertheless, perish in an hour by the folly, or corruption, or negligence of its only keepers, THE PEOPLE. Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people in order to betray them.

Indeed, President Ronald Reagan aptly called America “the shining city upon a hill.”  It is certainly a nation unlike any other and the last best hope for the world.  Therefore, it is incumbent upon us to preserve it.  As we commemorate the 250^th anniversary of America’s independence on July 4, 2026, we must likewise commemorate the death anniversary of two of the nation’s founders, namely Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, on July 4, 1826 (the 50^th anniversary of independence).  Such a convergence of events makes July 4 an exceptional American day.  In A Toast to Our Independence and Alliance, I quoted Senator Daniel Webster in his eulogy about the timing, who said, “It cannot but seem striking and extraordinary, that these two should live to see the fiftieth year from the date of that act, that they should complete that year, and that then, on the day which had fast linked forever their own fame with their country's glory, the heavens should open to receive them both at once.”

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a small confederation of states declared to the world that government derives its power from the people, not the other way around.  Every reason enumerated above, from the rejection of monarchy to the resolve against terrorism, is simply that founding premise working itself out across two and a half centuries, refined by trial, tested by war, and renewed by each generation that has refused to let it die.  As we celebrate this anniversary, let us also salute and pay tribute to Jefferson and Adams, and all those past heroes who have died to defend our liberty, and the current soldiers who continue to put our safety before their own.

Long live our brave soldiers!

Long live the Republic of the United States of America!

The post 8 Indisputable Reasons America Remains Exceptional at 250 first appeared on Marcial's Law.