Demeaning the Supreme Court
The Manila Times opines that the “Chief Justice Renato Corona is right. There is a propaganda effort to demean the Supreme Court and its decisions against issuances of President Benigno Aquino 3rd.The CJ said this on Thursday in his speech at a forum of the Foreign Correspondents’ Association of the Philippines (FOCAP).
He said people who criticize the High Court should first read the Court’s rulings. He did not name the critics he was upbraiding. But he could have been referring to Justice Secretary Leila de Lima and some of the allies of the Aquino administration.
The DOJ chief had spoken harshly about the SC’s decision to strike down President Aquino’s creation of the Truth Commission for being unconstitutional. Sec. de Lima said the High
Court’s decision favored former President Gloria Arroyo, the stated target of the aborted Truth Commission. Ms. de Lima said the former president was now reaping profits from her investment in appointing the justices of the Supreme Court. All of the High Court justices were appointed by Mrs. Arroyo, except Associate Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno, whom President Aquino appointed soon after he assumed office.
President Aquino himself had railed against the High Court and its decision to nullify his Executive Order creating the TC. He said the Court was derailing his anti-corruption campaign and preventing him from nailing down Mrs. Arroyo and others who had allegedly committed corrupt acts during the former president’s time in office.
But Chief Justice Corona was magnanimous and conciliatory toward the President.
He said. “I think everybody understands, the President himself understands, that this is our function. We have a right to decide the cases and people out there have the right to express their opinions about what we say or do. That is democracy.”
Apart from striking down the President’s EO 1 creating the Truth Commission, the High Court had also declared illegal EO 2 which sought to revoke former president Arroyo’s “midnight appointments.”
The chief magistrate said it did not worry him that the criticisms were giving the Court a bad image. “I’m more concerned about doing what is right.”
But there are people whose purpose is to demean, even demonize, the High Court and the justices themselves.
Some of these critics are enemies of our democracy. They want the government to fail. They know that making the judiciary, especially the Supreme Court look bad, will undo the good done by the people’s love for President Aquino. The people’s solid embrace of the President gives strength to our Republic.
Some of the critics are not malevolently against the Republic. They are simply people obsessed with their hatred for the previous regime. They do not want our Republic to be harmed by weakening the Supreme Court and the entire judiciary. They just cannot help thinking of the present Supreme Court as Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s Court. These people’s partisan prejudice is unfair to the good people in the Court. They miss to see the independence of the justices’ decisions.
“When we decide a case, we do so in the exercise of our constitutional duty to resolve conflicts. It is never to favor or defeat one or the other party. This, in essence, is really what decision-making is all about. A Supreme Court decision is not the judgment of one man alone but the collective opinion of both the majority and the minority combined,” the Chief Justice said.
Actually, the Corona High Court has not made a single decision that deserves condemnation. Even the decision that stunned the majority of current-events aware Filipinos—the reversal of the lower court’s guilty verdict on Webb et. al.—was indeed widely criticized. But fair and high-minded legal eagles have found that decision just and not the product of corruption among the Supremes. This, despite the bereaved Lauro Vizconde’s insistence that a justice lobbied among his peers to arrive at the not-guilty decision.
One of our problems as a nation is the weakness of our institutions. These institutions will be buttressed by the people’s faith in them. When the people by and large believe these institutions to be trustworthy and manned by leaders who have the common good and the well-being of our nation at heart, that faith helps transform the weak institution and inspires the officials in them to live up to the people’s expectations.
Stressing the weakness of the judiciary boosts the people’s lack of faith in our Republic. It is a comfort that the majority of our people continue to trust President Aquino. Surely, our democracy, our Republic, would be stronger still if the people also reposed as much faith in the judiciary.
The judiciary’s fidelity to their jobs is greatly needed, especially in these times when there is a crime wave and the national police leadership seems to be unable to discipline those officers—all over the country—who are henchmen of the cold-blooded kidnappers, carnappers, drug and jueteng lords.
It doesn’t help to inspire our magistrates to be more self-sacrificial in performing their duties when government officials, especially allies of the President, are the very ones who speak ill of the Supreme Court and its justices.
Thank God, the President himself has of late become more circumspect in speaking about the High Court. But other people among his political allies have still been sneering at what they insist is the “Gloria Arroyo Court.”
These allies of the President must stop demeaning the Supreme Court. For they are cutting one of the three legs of our government—making ours a wobbly, not a strong, Republic.
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