BY AMADO P. MACASAET
MALAYA
‘The haste that attended the impeachment is a manifestation of the necessity to remove Renato Corona from the Court so that Gloria Arroyo may be tried with fairness.’
THE nation remains in a state of bewilderment, stunned to see that the members of the House of Representatives were able to come together in such short notice to decisively act on a matter that they had no knowledge of the week before. To this day, the public’s proverbial mind is muddled with questions about the fate of the so-called priority bills long covered with mildew and buried in cobwebs. While the swift impeachment action of the House of Representatives is nothing short of miraculous, it has the distinction of being the single most destructive act heretofore seen.”
If Chief Justice Renato C. Corona is allowed his way, this and a few more silly arguments would convince the Senate to junk the impeachment complaint against him before he is even tried.
After browsing over the reply of the Chief Justice to the charges, we cannot help but conclude that the sins or crimes of the Arroyo government sit with law, but when they are committed by President Aquino they are violations of the Constitution and the laws.
The Chief Justice makes too big an issue of what he described as the lightning-speed with which the signatures of 188 members of Congress were gathered to impeach him.
Strangely, he does not cite any part of the Constitution or any piece of legislation that directly or indirectly says that what the 188 congressmen did was wrong. He merely said it was done in haste.
If the 24 senators accept the arguments for dismissal as meritorious, the charges against the Chief Justice may be dismissed, theoretically speaking.
But who can or has the power to reverse the ruling of the Arroyo Court that the President can make an appointment to the judiciary during a period expressly prohibited by the Constitution?
Nobody can do it except the majority of the magistrates by reversing the ruling so that the honor and dignity of the Constitution they wantonly violated may be stored.
The so-called “magic nine” in the Court the Chief Justice himself leads will not do it. The ruling penned by Associate Justice Lucas Bersamin is part of the law of the land and was crafted for the benefit of Mr. Corona and his patron, Gloria Arroyo. The Constitution was violated for no other reason but that.
The Chief Justice rides on the crest of that ruling. Only he and his cohorts defend it on the doctrine that the Court is right even when it is wrong.
This is the meat of what one member of the United States Supreme Court declared. He said we live by the Constitution but sometimes the Court and its magistrates become the Constitution.
Few are able to discern the fact that Gloria Arroyo knew that she would have to face charges after she stepped down. She had to make sure that she walked from the accusations particularly plunder.
The Chief Justice himself proved his naked bias for his patron in the petition for a TRO by Gloria Arroyo. The Court granted the petition and promulgated it even before it could even be written.
There is no defense against this other equally shameful trampling of the Fundamental Law of the land, a bias that irreparably destroyed the Judiciary. The truth or proof of the bias is proven by the records of the Court itself. Yet the Chief Justice seems to be full of himself with pride.
We might remind him of what a famous British essayist said “Of all the causes that conspire to blind Man’s erring judgment and misguide the mind, what the weak head with strongest bias rules Is pride, the never failing vice of fools.”
The House of Representatives, influenced, prodded or coerced by President Arroyo has the strongest desire and duty to resuscitate the judiciary from the grave Gloria Arroyo, ably assisted by her ward, the Chief Justice himself, shamelessly brought it to.
The only way is to impeach the Chief Justice and maybe later, a few more of his peers.
The petition to dismiss also states “What we see before us (then), is a complaint (for impeachment) born out of bias against CJ Corona and the predisposition to destroy him by associating him with the unpopular former President Gloria Macapagal and by misinterpreting his concurrence to certain Supreme Court decisions as protecting former President Arroyo. What we also have are the hidden forces who will be benefited by CJ Corona’s ouster and who are conspiring and causing intrigue behind the scene to ensure his removal and their re-emergence into power to the detriment of the Bench, Bar and populace. Certainly, such cannot be the backdrop, purpose and consequence of impeachment.”
This argument is patently wrong. It is democracy, justice and the rule of law that will benefit from the ouster of the Chief Justice. There is no conspiracy and hidden forces behind the effort to impeach and convict the Chief Justice.
There is conspiracy between the Court and Gloria Arroyo. That conspiracy which we must repeat is shown in the recent acts of the Chief Justice must be destroyed.
Impeachment is the only way.
Impeachment sits with the Constitution. The haste that attends the impeachment is a manifestation of the necessity or desire of the people, as shown in recent surveys, to remove Renato Corona from the Court so that Gloria Arroyo may be tried with fairness.
The impeachment cannot and should not be interpreted another way.
At the end of the day we must ask ourselves the question: which one do we want doomed? The Chief Justice and his Court loyal to Gloria Arroyo or the democratic institution that they conspired to trample upon as if it did not exist at all or existed only for the personal gains, if not glory of Gloria Arroyo?
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