Why are they all ganging on Chief Justice Sereno?
A few days before Christmas, we see the spectacle of one chief justice, the first female lawyer to head that mighty magistracy, being bullied by power-drunk members of the House, who are not saints by themselves, exacerbated by the threats of adverse testimonies allegedly from five incumbent associate justices of the Supreme Court and one retired former associate. This is not good for the country. This weakens the judiciary as an institution, and only serves to please those who are jealous of the young, inexperienced chief justice, who, to my mind, has not committed an impeachable offense.
To be fair, we do believe that Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno is not a perfect jurist. She has committed a lot of blunders out of her lack of experience both as a magistrate and as a leader of a collegial body. She was a full-time tenured professor in the UP School of Law, that bastion of so-called legal excellence whose selfproclaimed monopoly of superior legal wisdom is sometimes the cause of some feeling of academic arrogance in the legal community. Sereno has never been a city or municipal judge, not even a clerk of court or court interpreter. PNoy plucked her from nowhere and put her as "la prima inter pares" on top of the heads of the career judicial officers.
Her entry into the SC raised eyebrows and ruffled feelings of experienced legal luminaries like Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, justices Teresita Leonardo-de Castro and Presbitero Velasco Jr., then associate justice Arturo Brion, and career luminaries like justices Lucas Bersamin and Diosdado Peralta who struggled through the labyrinth of judicial ladders just to reach the SC, where only the wise, experienced, well-trained, and veterans of judicial careers should sit as magistrates. Never mind Justice Francis Jardeleza because, like Sereno and Justice Marvic Leonen, they never had any judicial experience.
Why are all the senior justices and the not-so-senior one ganging up on the chief? My opinion, with all due respect, is they might be thinking that if the chair should be vacated they might have that chance of a lifetime to be chief justice. Or that they really believe Sereno had wronged the court, offended them, or breached judicial protocols. But then again, did she commit an impeachable offense? I don't think so. All these notwithstanding, I do submit that in a way, this impeachment process might even turn out as a good experience for Sereno. It teaches her a lot of lessons in leadership and human relations. She should establish bonds with her brethren and sisters in the High Court. She is not a ruler or a monarch. She is just first among equals and should behave accordingly.