SC On Quo Warranto, The Gods Must Be Crazy

BIMBO CABIDOG

For now, they are silent. But come May their mouths will open, and what they will speak could send the nation into political turmoil.

The gods of Padre Faura think loudly these days. Legal minds, like the members of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP) and other concerned lawyers’ groups, hear them and dread.

Justices of the Supreme Court were once held high by the citizenry. They occupied a time-honored place above the ordinary scheme of things. They exuded prudence, and towered intellectually. Now they are held low with unavoidable distrust by the people.

Over the years, the magistrates have degenerated into umbrella bearers of the powers-that-be, then later to what former President Joseph Estrada called “hoodlums in robes.”

Lately, obsessed at convicting a person they accuse and judge without due process, they have donned the tunic of the Injustice League.

The current breed would not mind anymore tarnishing their reputation and damning their institution. They just wanna stop the term of SC Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno by hook or by crook.

For that single obsessive objective, driven by consummate envy and arrogance, they chose to shed their independence as a co-equal branch of government and yield to the instigation of the executive branch to take the matter of removing the CJ into their hands in reckless disregard of the Constitution.

At first, five of them descended from the high bench to pick up mud and rumble in the political brawl against their leader by Rodrigo Duterte’s thugs in Congress.

This was of no avail, for CJ Sereno still stood tall after they waded into the sludge and joined the muck-raking exercise against her of the Lower House’s Committee on Justice. They next hitched onto the illegal quo warranto petition of Digong’s attack dog, Solicitor General Jose Calida.

In the brazen attempt to mangle the law, the justices seem to be no longer thinking properly. They have become legal contortionists maddened by the desire to seal the fate of the Chief Justice. If they finally do so, a decision overriding her trial by an impeachment court will tear into the moral fabric of society.

There will be no more telling which yet is right or wrong, good or evil by universal standard. The Injustice League will have steered the nation into uncharted waters, a lost moral universe sprang out of their convoluted sense of what is appropriate for the nation.

God bless the country, for the wrecking ball they will hurl from their Mt. Olympus: removing a constitutional official beyond the pale of the Constitution. Uprooting a fourth highest authority of the land by mere quo warranto will indomitably wreak havoc on the rule of law and the constitutional order.

Hell-bent on lynching Sereno, the magistrates seem unmindful of the social cataclysm her unlawful ouster would generate. That the justices slipped it through the legal backdoor to satisfy their longing for vendetta, while giving way to the caprice of a despot, makes it all the more explosive.

The Charter says that the Chief Justice can only be removed by two-thirds of the Senate sitting as judges in an impeachment trial and finding her guilty as accused of impeachable offense.

Even non-lawyers know this. Lawyers should therefore know. But the magistrates and the Solicitor General out to lynch-mob Sereno are lawyers who would not stop at the knowledge. Their vicious craving to get her out entertains no bounds.

Should they finally oust her through the illegal application of an inapplicable means, it doesn’t make her guilty of any offense. It only makes her a victim of a wicked con: the nullification of her appointment by colleagues who have no mandate to do so.

It makes her the absorber of the gravest injustice and fraud by peers sworn to promulgate justice at the highest level and promote the noble spirit and intent of the law. The unkindest cut of all is they do so not because of any patriotic cause, but out of vindictiveness, selfish ambition and personal prejudice.

Yet, beyond the demolition of the CJ, the wrecking ball creates much greater damage to the nation at large. It renders ineffective the authority and mandate of the president to appoint the head of the Supreme Court from a short list of nominees of the Judicial and Bar Council by throwing out the prior acts of the JBC and the President.

In particular, it most arbitrarily repeals the decision of former President Benigno S. Aquino III to appoint Sereno to the position of CJ. Can the justices do this without circumventing the law, as some senators and other legal circles opine?

If the decision is ironically enforced by the present administration, the power of the JBC to nominate, and the Office of the President to appoint officials as mandated by the constitution, no longer mean anything, for their acts can just be overturned by some disgruntled justices who fancy doing so.

The imposition of such a monstrosity also means the invalidation of the authority not just of the Chief Executive, but also of the bicameral Commission on Appointments of Congress, or of Congress itself to determine with finality who should be placed in independent constitutional offices of the land.

Thus, the wrecking ball demolishes one major pillar of democratic rule in the post-Edsa period: the empowerment of Congress and the Executive arm, to take political decisions as provided for by the constitution.

Of course, the justices beholden no less to Digong may counter that the move is only for the particular instance of removing Sereno. They may pledge that the court will no longer resort to the monstrosity at any time in the future. That may be so, with regards to his dictatorial acts.

But having betrayed the public trust, it is foolish to yet trust their word unless force is brought to bear upon them. The power to compel them to toe the line now shall grow out of the barrel of the gun.

On the other hand, the wrecking ball is unloosed. It has started bringing down the legal-Constitutional order and the nation as a whole. Nothing may stop it anymore from continuing on the wild swings.

Hereon, no statute or provision of the law may stand unchallenged by a capricious tyrant. Every citizen may also just pick a club and strike another at will and have might rule the day.

The law will be what the justices state, what any other functionary like the SG states and, above all, what the capricious fascist who holds the guns, the tanks and the purse states.

Entertaining the quo warranto petition was in itself already a dangerous track. But the members of the high court chose to do so. By doing so, the supposed defenders of justice metamorphosed into its attackers. The guardians of the constitutional system became its abusers.

If the Injustice League indeed foists the unwarranted quo warranto against CJ Sereno on the legal system this May, the regime of democracy after the 1986 people power upheaval will come crashing down. And even the positions of the justices will lose the ground on which they stand.

Duterte has sought to weaponize the decision of Supreme Court justices against a constitutional official who dares to think differently. In a brazen show of corruption, they have given in. Do they ever think that the dangerous weapon in their hands may well rip the nation apart? Or do they purposely want to see it torn to pieces?