HIS MOTHER may have been the icon of Philippine democracy, but President Aquino III is fast becoming the nemesis Cory fought against more than 25 years ago.
The President himself is contributing to the summary execution of democracy by engineering the impeachment of Chief Justice Renato Corona. Whatever one’s reservation may be about Corona, his “midnight appointment” as chief jurist by former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and the quality and fairness of his leadership of the Supreme Court so far, his impeachment by the Aquino administration is tantamount to an attack of the judiciary and of constitutional democracy. It is nothing but a naked attempt by Aquino to shove Corona out of his post so that the President could appoint a head magistrate loyal to him and subservient to his interests.
Aquino and his minions have always complained about how Arroyo had politicized the judiciary by appointing Corona, a lawyer of the Arroyos, and by filling the high tribunal with her appointees before her watch ended. To be sure, all of the appointments had been screened and recommended by the Judicial and Bar Council, the duly constituted authority that screens nominees in the judiciary. There will always be complaints about the politicization of judicial appointees, but the fact is that appointments in the judiciary are made by an incumbent president. It was the case with Cory Aquino, Fidel Ramos, Joseph Estrada, Arroyo and all the presidents who came before them.
But President Aquino and his Congress allies insist that Corona should be impeached for alleged betrayal of public trust and culpable violation of the Constitution, especially for his alleged partiality to Arroyo in the several cases hounding her and for wrongly declaring his assets and liabilities. But while seeking to build a tight legal case against the Chief Justice, they also insist that impeachment is a political process. In short, they want to have their cake and eat it too. In the end, they argue numbers and politics are what matter, not truth and reason. We wish to disagree. However a political process, impeachment should be based on rules of evidence and due process. Impeachment should not be debased into a kangaroo court.
In any case, if politics operates in the impeachment process, it should be correct politics. The politicization of the impeachment process may be a given. But the Judiciary, since it is the weakest branch of government, must be shielded from the political machinations of the two other branches of the government. What we’ve been seeing is the Executive and Legislature going hammer and tongs at the Chief Justice and in effect, at the Judiciary. Correct politics must be upheld. The Judiciary must be protected.
Our constitutional democracy is under attack. The impeachment trial at the Senate has exposed how Aquino, the Executive branch and the House of Representatives have employed means fair and foul to establish their case against Corona. It has established, for example, how the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and monetary authorities, which otherwise should be independent, would put people from the anti-money money laundering agency in the audit team of banks checking on Corona’s bank accounts, at the apparent bidding of the Executive and its partisans.
The trial has also established how the Land Registration of Authority (LRA), whose head was the elementary school classmate of Aquino, would come up with a sensational list of properties allegedly owned by Corona to buttress the House prosecutors’ legal lynching of the Chief Justice only to be exposed as nothing but that—a sensational list that’s bereft of truth.
How the House has prosecuted the case largely through politics can be gleaned from its decision to drop most of the articles of impeachment against Corona. Because it could not prove the charges it made largely through the media, which have been all too willing to publish them, the House declared its job finished, even if it had jettisoned most of the articles of impeachment it itself had formulated in the first place. Either they were showing false bravado or they had started to believe their own delusions. In any case, Aquino and the House prosecution should be made to pay for all of the manhours lost by Malacanang and Congress and the nation as a result of raising what should constitute as a false alarm against Corona.
What’s the case against Corona now? The prosecution’s case is largely dependent on Corona’s alleged less than candid declaration of his assets. But as the prosecution itself admitted, Corona’s alleged “45 properties” listed wrongly by the LRA had largely been whittled down to 21, most of them explainable by the assets of his wife, Cristina, who belongs to the historically propertied class of the Basas of Cavite.
Perhaps because its case is breaking apart, the prosecution insinuates Corona has unexplained wealth. It insists that Corona’s dollar accounts have been shielded by the Senate court’s decision to respect the Supreme Court injunction against its disclosure. But while before the prosecution had been talking about an account worth millions of dollars, it is now citing about “reliable sources” putting it at $800,000, a comparative pittance anyone would admit.
In the politicization and prostitution of impeachment, a democratic process, the media should share the blame. It was the media that trumpeted all of the House prosecution’s sensational but largely false claims against Corona even before Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile banged the first gavel to open the trial. All of the embarrassing backtrackings made by the prosecution panel during the trial were made in reference to the false claims it made through the media. Incidentally, the key reversals and qualifications made by the prosecution hardly get headline play-ups in the press, which has been only too eager to banner the most sordid sins of Corona at the cost of accuracy, objectivity and fairness. The media have largely missed the opportunity to really educate the people about the impeachment process.
In the end, what has been happening is a travesty. Corona may not be the cleanest of magistrates (who really is?), but he should be protected by the law. Aquino, congressmen and senators, and the media should stop making the impeachment a numbers game in order to run roughshod over rules of evidence and due process. Even St. Thomas More relied on the law to defend himself. As the playwright Robert Bolt in his “Man for All Seasons” have the martyr declare, “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you–where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast–man’s laws, not God’s–and if you cut them down…d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.”
Yes, even the Devil needs to be protected by the law. And the people should give the Devil the benefit of the law – for the ultimate sake of their own safety and democracy.
