[Newspoint] Abomination

Associate Justice Marvic Leonen speaks further, as if he has not said enough.

It was he who penned the Supreme Court decision declaring the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte unconstitutional, on a technicality: the impeachment happened too soon, within one year of the last previous filing of an impeachment case against her, not past that, as the Constitution prescribes. The court’s manner of counting is widely debated, but that’s an irrelevant issue, a mere distraction. The fundamental issue is whether impeachment is any of the Supreme Court’s business.

Insistent that it has the power to intervene, the Court proceeds to decree rules on impeachment, telling Congress how to go about its own business. Again writing the pronouncement for the Court, Leonen suggests that, with those rules, impeachment is protected against abuse. 

It all seems to me not only presumptuous but self-serving; for one thing, Supreme Court justices are themselves impeachable officials. If that’s not abuse in itself, I don’t know what is. Well, to appropriate Leonen’s own remark on a comparable case, it’s a “legal abomination” — an abomination in more ways than simply legal, if you ask me. That original abomination referred to the mutiny on the Supreme Court that ousted its own chief justice, in 2018. 

Maria Lourdes Sereno has been the only constitutional official removed by a means other than as prescribed by the Constitution, by being indicted by the House of Representatives and subsequently tried and found guilty by the Senate. President Joseph Estrada’s removal, in 2001, was another abnormal case, but it was not unconstitutional, much less abominable: he resigned; he removed himself from office in the middle of his impeachment trial.

In Sereno’s case, it was her own court that short-circuited the process; it hijacked her case and, by a quick vote, removed her for a default excavated from her distant past — for failing to file a statement of her assets, liabilities, and net worth, as required of government employees (in her own case, as a law professor at a state university), making her, in the eyes of pristine-feeling colleagues, unqualified to continue to sit with them, and sit yet as their chief. A new appointee to the Court, by President Benigno Aquino III, she bypassed all previous appointees, mostly by Aquino’s sitting successor, Rodrigo Duterte, who made no secret of his intense dislike of her, a cue his appointees were prompt to pick up. 

Since Leonen, an Aquino appointee himself, participated in the process, it could not have been the process that he found abominable, but, rather, Sereno’s ouster itself. He did vote against it, but he also managed to resettle himself, quickly and nicely enough, in the company of those very ones responsible for the abomination he had condemned.

Actually, Sereno already had been put through the impeachment process, and some of the Supreme Court mutineers had even come to the House to testify against her at its hearings. But, in the end, they decided to deal with her themselves, not unlike a lynch mob grabbing a suspect from the law for a summary hanging.

There was no lynching in Duterte’s case, though; in fact, it was a rescue. And it benefited not only Duterte but also a Duterte-friendly Senate, which must have surely felt relieved by the Supreme Court intervention after coming under a storm of popular protest for its reluctance to try her, all too obvious in its nearly half-year of foot-dragging. It is odd that Leonen saw Sereno’s case as an abomination but not Duterte’s, and rather hypocritical of him, as a participant in both instances of abuse of power, to now be warning against it. 

As happens in a culture like ours, where power is maniacally coveted, it has become a matter of not only obsessive contention but also abusive application. And as final arbiter of constitutional and other legal issues, the Supreme Court is afforded the advantage by the very nature of its place in the scheme of things; indeed, other state institutions tend to concede it. 

Which is precisely the case with Congress. The House of Representatives has decided to go along and refile the case against Duterte. Actually, since the case had already been brought up to the Senate for trial when the Supreme Court hijacked it, the immediate responsibility falls to the Senate to put the Court in its place, promptly and decisively, if only to reinstitute the separation of powers between Congress and the courts as set by constitutional doctrine. All the Senate has to do is to proceed to try Duterte.

But the Senate is not so inclined either. For a moment, there lingered hopes that, after the midterm elections had put a new majority in the Senate, Sara Duterte might finally be put on trial. Those hopes have now been shown to be positively false. The new Senate president is himself copping out, promoting an old tune: Cha-Cha. It’s a tune inspired by the reflex notion that there’s no national problem that cannot be solved by lawmaking, of which Cha-Cha (charter change) is the wholesale version. 

We’re on our third Constitution, one for every generation since we became a Republic, in 1946. And we have laws galore to, supposedly, suit the Constitution to specific and practical purposes. But has anything been solved? If anything, more laws have only bred more offenders, and that’s because the problem is cultural and moral, unsolvable by lawmaking. – Rappler.com