THE TALE OF Chiefs versus Chief

The Gardener looks at how Heads of the Philippine State bang each other.

The nation and the world smiled, with quite a few going ballistic in taking sides. This, after all, was not a daily occurrence. In fact it looked like a rare one for the books – with a few more to come.

In a nutshell: the Philippine Chief Executive (President of the Philippines) had long been hitting hard at the Philippine Chief Magistrate (the Supreme Court Chief Justice) for illegal possession of office. No one had ever accused anyone like this before and in uncontrolled verbal assaults and non-verbal behavior of pique, chagrin and disgust.

The Chief Justice was denounced as a lackey of a former Chief Executive who was now under hospital arrest for charges of committing fraud and irregularities in past elections (but no plunder charges, yet.)

Another Chief – that of the bigger legislature with powers of the purse and impeachment (the House Speaker) –rushed to get 188 of his mates to sign articles of impeachment in support of presidential desires against the Chief Justice which the Chief of the smaller legislature (the Senate President) immediately took cognizance of, convening his house as an impeachment trial court, in accordance with some provisions of the 1987 Constitution. This was almost six months ago.

The situation was complicated but intelligible. It was the situation of the Head of the Judicial branch being under intense attack by the Head of the Executive branch in tandem with at least one of two Heads of the Legislative branch of government. Against such odds the Chief Justice was expected to fall down fast, and resign like another high official before him did. But this one seemed made of sterner stuff, at least as evidence had shown to date; and so, the situation became sticky not just for the attacked but equally for the attacker.

No doubt about it the Filipino people were again being treated to the dangerous entertainment of no holds-barred bouts among the ruling classes. The Pacquiao boxing schedules were behind us and he was now a proper congressman and a born-again bible-toting preacher. The American Idol contest was a touch-and-go. Both were of pure entertainment value.

“Chiefs versus Chief,” however, was different. This smacked of possible regime change at the end of the drama, or an unprecedented hegemony of a presidential advisory group over the branches of government, or the beginning of a truly revolutionary and therefore subversive dispensation that could and would seem to exorcise the ghost of corruption from the Philippine polity, or, more simply, the development of a strong presidency – in part imperial and in part democratic – in a state reduced to a minimum of checks and balances but maybe also one that could be functional at last.

The modern media proved equal to their business task of transmuting the populace into two – some into entertained factions eagerly awaiting daily the running score in the virtual amphitheater of big-time protagonists; others into blocks of blood-thirsty lynch mobs, virtually hooded and made blind to due processes and the rule of law.

Long before he got elected to the Presidency, when he was just a candidate for that office, Benigno Simeon Aquino III was already publicly berating Supreme Court Associate Justice Renato Corona for the possibility that he might accept an appointment by outgoing President Arroyo to the post of Chief Justice of this Republic. Aquino, who even as a candidate was bent on chasing Arroyo after victory (a mission or a hang-up worth writing about in another piece), was also made to believe that Corona as CJ would make his anti-Arroyo crusade most difficult indeed.

Did Benigno Simeon Aquino III – does he – equate “appoint” with “control”? It sure seemed that way to Corona who could not understand why and how Aquino’s mind was shut tight to the human possibility that even someone whom he had not appointed might just also prove to be competent, honest and fair, even though, or especially if such a person were not under his control. Corona offered an olive branch out but was rebuffed and rejected. Thus he was soon convinced: control is precisely what motivated the President or his advisers to keep fanning his anger for the Chief Justice, head of a co-equal branch of government.

For one thing, the “rush to judgment” was proverbial. The thinkers and implementers of the stratagem against the Chief Justice knew that the President was perceived to be very popular by most politicians. Members of the legislature could therefore be relied on to expect him to continue what he was already doing – that is, use a parentally derived popularity to convict the Chief Justice in the court of public opinion, employing non-stop presidential pronouncements without regard or respect for an impeachment court that anyway was also presumably “political” and would therefore need not be as strict with evidence as an ordinary criminal court would– or so it sometimes seemed.

Could the impeachment court ever stop the president, even if it wanted to, from his anti-Corona fulminations using the bully pulpit of the presidency, and all its accoutrements, offices and budgets? And likewise, could it stop Corona from periodically hitting back?

Early on, a few, a very few truly got worried that the President’s intense dislike if not hatred for the Chief Justice would result in old popular moods rearing their ugly heads once again. For instance, our national penchant for vindictiveness in the name of all that is pious and holy such as justice and truth and integrity.

Did it really take less than a day to have the CJ impeached by 188 signatures from the bigger house, as often is mentioned by all sides? A key member of the Prosecution Panel, Representative Rodolfo Farinas quite frankly admitted that he did not join the 188 signatories in signing the Articles of Impeachment because the document was  “badly done”:

“I am a slow reader (mabagal kasi akong magbasa eh,)            And when the complaint was presented to us (kaya nung prinisenta sa amin yan…) When the last one had signed (nung nakapirma na yung panghuli)   There are many speed-readers there (maraming speed reader kasi diyan eh) –            Because so many had already signed, 188, (dahil sobra-sobra  ang pumirma na, 188) My signature was no longer needed and the complaint was badly done (di na kailangan ang pirma ko at masama ang pagkagawa  ng complaint).”

It looked like, if truth be told, that the majority signatories were busier calculating the effects on their financial representative position of the absence or presence of their signatures – certainly much more than on whether the Chief Justice really deserved to be impeached or not. Most of them used to go along fine with the former president Arroyo, didn’t they? What’s wrong with their going along now with the strong desires of the incumbent president Aquino? Has one never heard of the Department of Budget and Management, and of the real distinction between funds appropriation and funds releases?

In the end, one said, it did not matter whether they had evidence or not to indict the highest magistrate of the land. They had no time for evidence. Evidence was “to follow” and would presumably follow using various forms of fishing expeditions, complete with anonymous tips from deep-throat-type sources that time and again expectedly proved to be gross mediocre fabrications.

In another country and culture they used to call this practice pure witch-hunting or McCarthyism – utterly despicable and evil. The method is gleefully subversive: win public opinion first with well-funded communication programs that justifiably condemned one before or during trial so that the rule-of-law could more easily be over-ruled and due process would no longer be due.

The whole trial is on TV. The well-nigh sacrosanct court of public opinion and its constellation of opinion-makers, publicists, and psy-war experts would now constitute the court of first and last instance. In all transparency,  and without any apologies, the President personally led in casting aside any regard for the sub judice character of the matter before the impeachment court. To him and his advisers the impeached-accused was eo ipso guilty. Why did he not just resign?

Among gardeners the question was asked more and more frequently: Was the accused not afraid of what the president could do to him? Did he not know that mere presidential desire could make the Ombudsman work together, breathe together (con-spirare) with the COA and the AMLC and who else … to weave a tale of plunder and corruption with mere anonymous sources given more importance not once or twice or thrice but many times over?

Thus, rule-of-law processes, for which peoples and nations had struggled for hundreds of years to establish, were now being   set aside by a strategy that was simply the exasperatingly unoriginal but often effective tack of casting every one else as corrupt … except for the leader now cast in the role of knight – knight in shining armor. Was this leader not the new Sir Galahad whose strength was as the strength of ten because, allegedly, his heart was pure?

But as already noted the defendant Chief was no pushover. He decided to use the impeachment court as his own pulpit – his sure forum to get to the court of public opinion. A 0.1% flaw marred his 99.9% successful performance of explaining everything and showing that the prosecution had nothing to impeach him on.

When he suddenly rose to leave with the audible line, “The Chief Justice of the Republic of the Philippines wishes to be excused” he probably forgot that the Presiding Officer of the Impeachment Trial Court was the former Administrator of the Marcos Martial Law regime and was still quick enough on the draw to physically prevent him from being excused.

Whatever happens now, however, the accused Chief has succeeded in challenging his accusers to bare all as he himself is willing to. He has succeeded in paraphrasing the undying line of the ages: 188 + 1, if you are without guilt you may cast the first stone; but if you are guilty it may be better to leave those stones alone.

The Peace that the world cannot give is certainly not forthcoming from any of the nation’s embattled Chiefs. They have excited the people into turbulence and hatreds and divisions. It is time to keep still and go back to basics in the next few days. See you in the Garden.

FINIS