IMPEACHING ON ANECDOTES
CHIEF Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno does not have the intellectual heft of Elena Kagan and the amazing tenacity of Ruth Baden Ginsburg in deciding for the kind of law that is just, human and fair. But there is one quality she shares with these three woman justices – a predisposition to always be the judicial system who see the law as a negotiable instrument.
That alone makes her an ideal CJ in this particular juncture of Philippine judicial history.
to a bedrock provision of the Constitution – that the three main branches of government are co-equal and not one should exercise too much power. The Constitution is very clear on the three branches, the trinity from which all important public decisions come from.
The Constitution does not allow one branch to dominate, with, of course, a little leeway for the Executive. Because the abuse of power by any one branch is already a breach, an assault, on the democratic process. A democracy as unstable as ours is dearly threatened by the abuse of power by any one branch. It shakes the democracy ecosystem that may not be stable enough to absorb epic shocks, or any shock at all.
CJ Sereno is currently facing an im- Representatives. There is a laundry list of alleged grounds for impeachment of getting an “impeach vote”. Should the leadership get one, the action will shift to the Senate, which would render
Right now, it is hard to gauge the sentiment of the senators and an “impeach“verdict is not that guaranteed despite the loyalty of majority of the appears to be not involved but nothing would please him more than a verdict of “impeach”.
The sense of the House, if you dig deeper into the whys and wherefores of the impeachment complaint, is that CJ Sereno is independent. That she takes a dim view of many of the executive promulga - not be expected to say “amen “to issues like the Marcos burial at a ground for heroes. She renders her decisions with the view that the law does not have any color and biases President, no matter how popular.
there is a general hostility to this kind of mindset and that was the general motivation behind the move to impeach.
Will the impeachment of CJ Sereno be of any good—even just a parcel of good—for the country and the body politic?
The alternative, which is really a plausible scenario after an impeachment, makes many scream in wielding chief justice as the CJ of our realm. Men of a certain age want to expunge a dreadful event in our country that involved a chief justice and a parasol. It needs retelling.
event, Mrs. Imelda Marcos, the then First Lady, was exposed to the sun. Such occasions had always been a display of fealty – who can pop in the umbrella that would shield Mrs. Marcos from the sun on the quick? It turned out that a bespectacled man, gentle in manner, did and coiffed, bejeweled women always fawning over Mrs. Marcos .
That man of gentle manner happened to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Enrique Fernando. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court holding the umbrella that shielded Mrs. Marcos from the sun. Not the guards, not the members of the security detail, not the alalay of Mrs. Marcos who would gladly jump from the high floors of buildings just to please her, not the political posse but the CJ himself. That was an opti that could only exist in a fullblown banana republic.
An inventory of the events about fealty and submission during the Marcos years will probably rank the optic of the parasol-wielding CJ among the top three. Based on this fear that we may repeat the folly of mendacity, the impeachment hearing should be frozen on its tracks.
The best case against the impeach - budsman was laid out by a business to succeed big-time for the simple reason that they would be the big winners in any economic surge under the president. I seldom agree with the Makati Business Club all the “clubs” I have joined were peasant groups and repeat the MBC’s arguments.
“We believe that the impeachment process engraved in the Constitution must not be invoked arbitrarily to persecute and silence individuals with opposing views, nor to undermine independent institutions, the bulwark of our nation’s democrac .
The impeachment cases must be substantiated by strong evidence of culpable violation of the Constitution,