All the while, I thought Heidi Mendoza was an intelligent woman. Then I saw her post asking, essentially, why people are making an issue out of “16” when it is supposedly so easy to understand.

Perhaps the irony is that the constitutional provision is actually the easy part. The Constitution does not say 16. Article XI, Section 3(6) says: “No person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two-thirds of all the Members of the Senate.”

There is no “16” in that sentence. Sixteen is simply the mathematical result of applying two-thirds to the Senate’s current 24 members:24 × 2/3 = 16. That distinction matters. If the Constitution had said “16 Senators,” then 16 would be the fixed constitutional number. But it didn’t.

The framers chose a fraction—two-thirds of all the Members of the Senate. And there is an obvious reason for using a fraction rather than permanently writing a number: constitutional provisions can be amended.

If the constitutionally prescribed membership of the Senate were ever changed, the fraction would remain applicable while the numerical threshold would change accordingly. For example, if there were 30 senators, two-thirds would be 20—not 16.

Of course, under the current Constitution, Article VI provides for a 24-member Senate. So nobody is suggesting that Congress can simply pass an ordinary law tomorrow and turn the Senate into 30 members. That’s a separate constitutional question.

But that is precisely why saying “the threshold is 16” as though 16 itself were the constitutional language misses the point. The constitutional language is TWO-THIRDS OF ALL THE MEMBERS. So before telling everyone that the matter is “madali namang intindihin,” perhaps we should first read the sentence we’re supposedly understanding.

Because sometimes the hardest thing to understand isn’t mathematics. It’s the difference between what the Constitution actually says and what we wish it said.