A judicial checkmate?

IN the history of the Philippine judiciary, there has been only one successful impeachment of a sitting Chief Justice and that was against the late Renato Corona on December 12, 2011. In the history of the Supreme Court, the appointment of Maria Lourdes Sereno as Chief Justice was very unique. She was appointed August 24, 2012 at the age of 52, the second youngest person appointed since Manuel Moran in 1945, and the first woman to head the judiciary.

Previous to Corona, an impeachment case was filed against Chief Justice Hilario Davide in 2003. The first complaint was insufficient in substance while the second, due to the one-year prohibition against initiating an impeachment case against the same

- cessfully impeached by the House of Representatives, but only CJ Corona was convicted. The four are President Joseph Estrada (impeached but the trial was aborted); Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez (resigned before the House could dispense with the charges); Corona ( impeached, convicted and removed) and Comelec Chair Andres Bautista (impeached on the same day he resigned). Pending before the House is the impeachment of CJ Sereno, said to transmitted to the Senate for trial before Congress goes for its Holy Week break.

The power of impeachment is an accountability tool found in Article XI of the 1987 Constitution. The framers clearly wrote in the law of the land must, at all times, be accountable to the people, serve them with utmost responsibility, integrity, loyalty and - is weighed, assessed and considered.

The impeachable officials are the President and the Vice President, both of whom are elected. They derive their mandate from the voters. The rest are members of the Supreme Court, members of the constitutional commissions and the Ombudsman, all of whom are appointed by the president. To whom should they be accountable? To the people or the appointing power? The theory is that the members of Congress are the representatives of the people; that is why impeachment is a political process that emanates from the Constitution.

It used to be that initiating impeachment in the House was a game of numbers and that to get it beyond form and substance, you had to muster the numbers in the plenary so the articles of impeachment could be transmitted fast to the Senate. The Estrada impeachment saw the power of motions and its precedence from the opening prayer to transmittal via (live voice) vote. The Corona impeachment saw the majority muscling their way from a badly drafted complaint to a race to secure the numbers after a majority caucus where by the end of the day, the then chairman of the justice committee Niel Tupas “informed the president of their decision to impeach Corona, and that the president supported it. The House of Representatives then voted in session to endorse the complaint, getting 188 votes, well above the onethird (95) of the members required by public saw President Aquino’s famous grinning photo with members of the House of Representatives splashed all over the broadsheets in Manila. It was like a victory of sorts and a bad portent of things to come.

The sins of Corona were said to be the “court’s granting of a temporary restraining order lifting the watch list order of the Department of Justice against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo; Arroyo’s midnight appointment of Corona; and the ruling of Camarines Sur’s two new legislative districts as constitutional despite falling short of the required population set by the constitution. More than all of these was the Supreme Court Hacienda Luisita ruling by a vote of 14 to 0. The high court ordered on November 22, 2011, the distribution of land to the farm workers of Hacienda Luisita, a huge sugar estate owned by the family of President Benigno Aquino 3rd.

We saw how the Liberal Party used all levers of power to ensure that Corona was convicted. From eight articles of impeachment, they got Corona on Article 2 which was “failure to disclose to the public his statement of assets, liabilities, and net worth as required Corona was convicted and removed as Chief Justice because of his “failure to - ing expedition with the aid of a small lady leaving behind documents at the gate of a member of the prosecution’s team, and the testimony of another who claims he got the same documents and wanted to give it to the Senate President with media on hand. All in all, the public was regaled with the most inane excuses so that certain evidence could be introduced to the frame and cover the real reason for the impeachment.

By April 2012, as the Corona impeachment trial was pending, the Hacienda Luisita. The court ruled that Hacienda Luisita had implemented a bogus land reform and ordered the distribution of the land to its farmerworkers with compensation.

And the money that changed hands was in the billions to ensure the conviction and removal of CJ Corona. The attendant events after the vote saw a Senate president, a Senate president pro tempore and a senator who talked about entering Malacañang driven by a cabinet secretary, placed under arrest. After the fact, we discovered too such alphabet soup for the soul named DAP and the creative ways of impounding, realigning and converting savings without the approval of Congress.

Would that be the same with CJ Sereno? No, it appears that it will not go the way of Corona in the sense that everything was political and manufactured. With the way the House committee on justice chaired by Oriental Mindoro Rep. Ray Umali has been more circumspect in reviewing the complaint of lawyer Lorenzo Gadon, things appear to be different. After 15 hearings on probable cause, the justice committee will present to the plenary its report and this is where the The signs point otherwise because the process was not short- circuited. What would drive the impeachment would be the acts of CJ Sereno and Sereno’s colleagues. This is the first and only time Associate Justices appeared and testified against a sitting CJ. This is also the first and only time 13 justices of the Supreme Court spoke as one in relation to the

Can Sereno avail of the power of judicial review once the House sends its articles of impeachment to the Senate? With that unprecedented en banc press statement, the remaining 14 years of Sereno’s 18 years may just be summed up in a checkmate where Sereno resigns. In chess, it is considered bad etiquette to continue to play in a completely hopeless position. Can she still go back as CJ and perform her duties after an impeachment trial in the Senate? Eighteen years as Chief Justice covering three presidents and setting aside the seniority rule may just have worked against Sereno.