Since the two recent Neri rulings of the Philippine Supreme Court which upheld the doctrine of executive privilege in favor of Neri and the President of the Philippines against the power of the Senate to conduct inquiries in aid of legislation, various editorials, reports and opinions have been published in Philippine dailies vehemently assailing the lack of wisdom of the Supreme Court, a sample of which is the incisive and insulting column of the prominent Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist Conrado de Quiroz (Sept. 8, 2008), to which I agree. The saving grace of the Supreme Court is that the Chief Justice and 5 other Associate Justices dissented.
The majority of the Supreme Court (also derisively called the “Arroyo Court”) is made up of appointees of the incumbent Pres. Gloria Arroyo, whose political survival seems to be her main focus for the next 2 years until her term ends in 2010 (hopefully, that is). Thus:
MANILA, Philippines - Truly, the hardest people to wake up are those pretending to be asleep.
One is tempted to say that Chief Justice Reynato Puno, Consuelo Ynares-Santiago, Ma. Alicia Austria-Martinez, Adolfo Azcuna, Antonio Carpio and Conchita Carpio Morales are surrounded by fools. But Teresita Leonardo de Castro, Leonardo Quisumbing, Renato Corona, Dante Tinga, Minita Chico-Nazario, Presbitero Velasco Jr., Antonio Eduardo Nachura, Ruben Reyes and Arturo Brion are not fools. They are worse than fools. They are fairly intelligent people (though I could be wrong) who are dedicated to spreading ignorance. They are people the world presumes to be sane, which is why they are in the Supreme Court (though being in Gloria’s Supreme Court is not necessarily a sign of it), who are dedicated to fomenting an insanity.
They are of course the nine who, against the sterling opposition of the first six, upheld their decision on executive privilege. Most of the legal luminaries of this country, including the former Supreme Court chief justices, have already fulminated at the idiocy of the earlier decision, which merely took away with the left hand what the right hand gave. The Supreme Court took away EO 464 but gave back executive privilege. Henceforth, public officials may not be prevented from being summoned by the Senate to shed light on shenanigans in the highest places. But they may be prevented after being summoned from shedding light on the darkest places in the highest places. It adds whole new meanings to “supreme.”
We need not repeat here what the legal luminaries said, which in any case common sense easily supplants. What national interest is breached by Romulo Neri telling the world whether or not his boss approved, abetted and ultimately rammed through a shady deal? Unless we grant that GMA is the state—“l’état, c’est moi”—and that her survival is the supreme national interest, then revealing it does completely the opposite. It protects the national interest by exposing, and stopping, a horrendous threat to it. What the Supreme Court has just upheld is not executive privilege, it’s aristocratic privilege, the kind that put kings and nobles above the law. For whom? Queen Gloria? The one crowned by Garci?
We need only bring up here that mantra of the Nine that the Senate is not an investigative body, it is a legislative one. “The role of the legislature is to make laws, not to determine anyone’s guilt of a crime or wrongdoing.”
At the very least, the NBN is no Brunei-beauties investigation, it involves the highest officials of the land in a conspiracy not just to defraud the public but pretty much sell off the country, parcel by parcel, if not lock, stock and barrel, to another one. A conspiracy that boils to this day and is near to cooking the goose after the Supreme Court agreed to scotch-tape Neri’s mouth. Mike Defensor, GMA’s favorite abductor, has gotten his lion’s share of it. Pray, who is to investigate that? Who is to unearth that? Who is to stop that? Raul Gonzalez? Merceditas Gutierrez? Avelino Razon? Malacañang Internal Affairs? GMA herself? By sheer default, the Senate is bound by the most compelling and sacred of duties to do it.
Far more than that, why should ferreting out the truth and making laws be separate and mutually exclusive? Why should aiding legislation not take the form of stopping wrongdoing? In fact stopping wrongdoing—particularly of this scale—is the only guarantee the legislature can ever make laws. Where’s the sense of producing laws you know will not be followed? Where’s the sense of trotting out bill upon bill, law upon law, that decrees this and that decrees that, when daily you see it being trashed by the very people sworn to implement it? First, stop the trashing, then make laws. Otherwise we’ll just be exacerbating deforestation and the garbage problem at the same time—using tons of pulp to print laws and hauling truckloads of the same to Payatas.
Last year, I was on one of the panels that interviewed the senatorial candidates, and was amused by the amount of paper that came my way. This was in the form of the voluminous resumés many of the candidates had to show how many bills they had authored. I doubt any one of them seriously meant for their offerings to be read. They just meant them in all their corpulent glory to impress. In fact, I was impressed only with the words, “Big deal!” What a crass, mechanical and petty idea of lawmaker this was.
That is the kind of “making laws” that has made this country teem with laws but reek of lawlessness. The legislature is not just there to makes laws, it is there to make law. That is the one thing it shares with the Executive and Judiciary, to make law in the most resplendent meaning of the word, the kind that springs from justice and not from the endless expenditure of spit, the kind that springs from the human need for betterment and not from inhuman need to proliferate “whereas-es.”
“Teach law in the grand manner,” the law school says, not least UP’s. If so, then make law in the grand manner too. The kind that, springing as it does from justice as clean water from a pure source, will not brook wrongdoing, will not suffer felony, will not tolerate malefaction. The kind that, mindful as it is of right and wrong, will set out to punish wrong and reward evil—nowhere more so than at a time of hate and cholera, where good is damned and evil exalted. The kind that, branded as it is in the human heart and not just in the congressional records, will compel obedience with the force of instinct, the need for preservation, or of a truth we know, or recognize, as self-evident.
The rest are just a bunch of “whereas-es.” With emphasis on the asses.
