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But of course, how could I be so naïve! It’s the story of our national life. In fact, some of the most shameless chapters of that story have occurred in recent times.
It’s hard to imagine how the Supreme Court could carry on with any credibility, given the storm of dissent it has provoked with its ruling declaring the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte unconstitutional.
Even before that ruling came down, a survey had shown that eight in 10 Filipinos wished to see Duterte held to account by impeachment trial, and with commonsensical and moral reason: The House of Representatives, at exhaustive hearings undertaken jointly by four of its committees, had turned up uncontroverted evidence that hundreds of millions of taxpayer pesos had been misappropriated from her budget.
If the Supreme Court had not intervened in the case — which was none of its business in the first place — and if the Senate, as the impeachment court, had begun the trial once Duterte was impeached by the House — “forthwith,” as the Constitution commands — a verdict should have been reached by now. In the last impeachment trial, it took all of five months to convict Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona, and just as well: Impeachment cases are intended precisely to be resolved quickly because grave harm could continue to be caused the nation were the wrongdoer allowed to continue in office and also remain eligible for public office.
As it happened, the Senate dribbled the case, giving the Supreme Court an excuse to “overreach” (in the word of Antonio Carpio, who had served on that court himself until not too long ago). Naturally, the Senate was only too happy to be upheld, by the highest court no less, in its reluctance to put Duterte on trial. In fact, it perked up from its long lethargy and rushed a vote to “archive” the case — bury it, in other words. Obviously, it was unwilling to wait, even if only out of minimal decency, for the Supreme Court to signal its pronouncement that the case was decidedly dead by denying the motion asking it to reconsider its ruling.
Retracing the controversial course taken by the case, it is not unreasonable to suspect that the preemptive vote was another conspiratorial signal. The Senate’s initial slowness had bought time for Duterte — time for her lawyers to go to the Supreme Court and time for the Supreme Court to go through the motions of decision making.
Even granting that the Senate and the Supreme Court have a plausible legal point — Did the impeachment fall within the prescribed period? — they have put themselves in an untenable moral position by favoring the impeached over the impeachers, the people’s champion, in an issue intended by the Constitution to be decided by impeachment trial.
Not to mention, the Supreme Court, on its own, is up against legal institutions and individual experts, including retired Supreme Court justices, for going even beyond overreach and into overkill by decreeing new impeachment rules that tilt the balance of justice in favor of all impeachable officials, among whom its own justices count themselves. By those rules, the Supreme Court gets to have its cake and eat it, too!
I had meant to ask a resource person I regularly seek for his opinion on how the Supreme Court could have descended into such levels of arbitrariness and amorality. But, to spare him the risk of being taken out of context beyond his comfort zone, I chose to rephrase the question and own it as a commentary, How dare the court!
His reply: “It’s like, I did because I could.”
But of course, how could I be so naïve! It’s the story of our national life. In fact, some of the most shameless chapters of that story have occurred in recent times.
In 1972, Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law and, for the next 14 years, ruled and plundered as a dictator. A mere generation later, his Junior acceded to the presidency in an election disputed as manipulated — he has lasted past the midterm, and the odds are he would finish his term. A former lawyer of Junior’s happened to be a member of the electoral commission, appointed there just two months before the vote by President Rodrigo Duterte, whose own daughter, Sara herself, was Junior’s running mate. Upon taking office, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. promoted his commissioner to chairman.
In 2004, after serving out the remaining three years of an impeached president who avoided trial by resigning, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was caught on audiotape asking an election commissioner for help to get herself elected to a regular six-year presidential term; she was installed all the same. After losing her immunity from suit upon retiring from the presidency, she was charged in court with plunder, but a Supreme Court she had had a chance to pack with appointees during her unusually long reign acquitted her in a final appeal. She has since sat in Congress, going into the right alliances to assure herself of a place in the ruling coalition.
In 2016, upon taking office, President Duterte declared a war on drugs and loosed police and assassins with practically a license to kill. He is now in The Hague, the Netherlands, extradited and detained there while waiting to be tried by the International Criminal Court, in lieu of our impotent judiciary — impotent in his particular case, anyway — on charges of “crimes against humanity,” for the tens of thousands killed in his war. But he may yet get away with treason for ceding our western sea to China, the rival claimant that we had defeated in an international arbitration over those territorial waters.
Marcos, Arroyo, and Duterte, they all did because they could — and nobody could stop them. – Rappler.com
