By voting 8-6 to grant the “quo warranto” petition of Solicitor General Jose Calida against Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno and effectively ousting her, the Supreme Court has shown its true colors: it’s an adjunct and a satrap of the Executive. Its justices do not decide a case based on the law, but based on might. It’s really the weakest and the most-bully prone of the three branches of government. It’s not supreme but subordinate; it’s a sex slave, a whore.
What the majority of justices has shown is that the Supreme Court is not an objective, impersonal body that upholds the Constitution and Philippine laws, but a petty, vindictive group of persons that would twist the law based on their personal whims and caprices, their inordinate appetites for power and ambition; they would sacrifice law, justice and democracy at the slightest excuse to satisfy self-serving interests.
The Supreme Court has made a mockery of the law it is supposed to uphold. We agree with the Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG) of human rights lawyers that the quo warranto case against Sereno had been filed way beyond the required period provided by the law and that it should not be a substitute for impeachment. With the ruling, the Solicitor General becomes the most powerful office in the land after President Duterte, who can now use the ruling to go after impeachable officials who oppose his murderous despotism.
FLAG has said that the ruling ushers in “the new era of judicial obsequiousness to the executive and legislative,” but we beg to disagree. The Judiciary has always been obsequious to the two powerful political branches of the government, and Sereno herself had been a beneficiary of that when she was made chief justice by President Benigno Aquino III to replace Renato Corona, who had been impeached and ousted in an impeachment process that was clearly a political trial, with Malacañang and its allies in Congress forcing its officials, for example, to violate bank secrecy and other laws to expose Corona’s alleged misstatement of his assets and worth.
But while Corona’s ouster was done within the obligatory gestures and surface action of “due process,” Sereno’s ouster through blatant violation of the Constitution and the laws: it was naked and abject mockery of the law without any sense of decency. Like the extra-judicial killings and genocide of thousands by the Duterte administration, it’s an overkill of injustice and blind disregard of the law. It is lawlessness without apologies. In a way, what this episode has unmasked is the conspiracy among the three branches of government of the Philippine republic. It shows that the Philippine state doesn’t work for Filipinos or for democracy; they work for their own petty self-interests to satisfy their lust for power and ambition. It shows that the Philippine republic is not a democracy but a whoredom: politicians like Duterte and Calida are the pimps, and jurists like Teresita de Castro and Francis Jardeleza are the prostitutes.
