See - http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20110125-316392/Not-very-grand
There's The Rub
Not very grand
CHIEF JUSTICE Renato Corona has a complaint. There’s a smear campaign against his Court, he told the foreign correspondents last week. He doesn’t know exactly who’s behind it. “All I know is there are people who (have gone) out of their way to disparage the decisions of the Supreme Court.”
“When the Court decides a case, it neither asserts its moral ascendancy or dominance over, nor encroaches on, nor interferes in the powers of a co-equal branch of government. Stated figuratively, the Court does not wield the power of the sword, nor does it have the power of the purse, but it has the power to interpret the Constitution …. I think there is a constituency out there that we must convince of the rightness of a decision and the need to communicate with them, the reasons why we acted this way or that way.”
This reminds me of the way the Department of Education reacted to an unprecedented strike by the public school teachers way back in the early 1990s. The strike was clearly a plot against government, the education officials said, and they had asked the law enforcement agencies to hunt down its instigators. I said then that the law enforcement agencies might have trouble hunting down the instigators of the strike because they had no permanent addresses and went by many aliases. Among them, Poverty, Hunger and Injustice. The public school teachers themselves said they had replaced the carabao as the country’s primary beast of burden.
I say the same thing now. The Supreme Court may have trouble identifying the instigators of the smear campaign against it because those instigators have no permanent addresses and go by many aliases. Among them, Common Sense, Basic Decency and Justice. The people themselves see the Court’s decisions as they are and ask why, and see the Court’s decisions as they can be and ask why the hell not.
I am one of those who have disparaged those decisions, and am one constituency that can do with being convinced about their rightness, or indeed why the Supreme Court has acted this way and that way. I would be very interested for example to know what is so right about not asking one of its own justices to resign after he was shown not only to have plagiarized a legal luminary’s opinion about a legal principle but to have perverted that principle to argue against the author’s intent. Who was of course Justice Mariano del Castillo and about a case that had to do with the comfort women. Del Castillo did not just copy Evan Criddle’s argument word for word, an argument that said the state was duty-bound to take up the case of the comfort women, he used it to dismiss the comfort women’s petition for it.
More than that, I would be very interested to know what is so right not just about not asking one of its own to resign for contemptible behavior but going to ask the UP professors who exposed the misdeed to show cause why they should not be cited for contempt. The first was bad enough, the second is just mind-boggling. It adds whole new meanings to the word “supreme,” it adds whole new dimensions to the phrase “curiouser and curiouser.” Can there be a more patent case of injustice?
If this were a lone and solitary case, the Supreme Court might be excused for experiencing temporary insanity, however its scale makes it hard to excuse a court for, let alone a supreme one. But that comes along in the span of less than a year with such Supreme Court decisions as: upholding the midnight appointments, refusing to televise the Ampatuan trial, and aborting the Truth Commission. That is no longer an accident, that is a pattern. That makes the Court itself the very constituent that needs convincing—if at all it wants to listen—about the wrongheadedness of its cause.
What’s so wrong with that is that it betrays the essence of the Court. The business of law, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, and as the UP College of Law proclaims, is to practice law in the grand manner, and nowhere is that truer than with the Supreme Court. Certainly, the business of law is not to be legalistic, or to find a statute or two to defend a narrow interest, or worse a self-serving one, and nowhere is that truer still than with the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court may not assert its moral ascendancy over the other branches of government, but it may, and should, assert its moral ascendancy over matters of justice. That is what it is there for: It is not a trier of facts, it is a trier of principle.
Doubtless you can always find a law or two to justify upholding the midnight appointments, refusing to televise the Ampatuan trial, and aborting the Truth Commission. You can also always find a law finding Ferdinand Marcos and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo innocent of plunder. But that is not practicing the law in the grand manner, that is being the devil quoting the Scripture to serve his purposes.
In the end, the fundamental, existential, primordial problem of the Supreme Court today is that it is headed by Renato Corona. The Court has upheld the midnight appointments? Well, he is a midnight appointee himself. The Court will not allow a commission that will show the truth about Arroyo’s lies? Well, if Arroyo is proved illegitimate, then his appointment is void. If Corona had been practicing law in the grand manner, or never mind the law, if he had simply been living life in the grand manner, he should never have accepted the position of chief justice in the midnight hour. Indeed, he should never have lobbied for the position in the witching hour. Does he really need convincing there is something profoundly wrong with being named Chief Justice by the Chief Witch at a Cheap Time?
That does not a Supreme Court make, that only a Lucky Me Supreme makes. My apologies to the mami.
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