"x x x.
In other words, while fixing blame is all part of the process of learning from one’s mistakes, no notable gain of the sort shows. And where precisely the need for reform is most urgent, not only has it gone unalleviated, it has been aggravated—in the dispensation of justice, in fact right at the highest levels.
Their chief impeached—for concealing improbable wealth and for, in yet other ways, betraying the public trust—tried, found guilty, and fired, and an associate justice facing similar proceedings, for plagiarism, the holdouts of the Supreme Court remain standing, almost to a justice, unchastened, in denial, indeed defiant. They insist that, as the dialect idiom goes, nothin’s broke with their court, and therefore nothin’ need fixin’, and that certainly they need no leadership from an outsider.
Apparently taking fraternal notice, the Judicial and Bar Council, a panel formed from among leaders of the legal establishment, including former judges, to screen and shortlist nominees to the Supreme Court, proceeds to work on a particular nominee, focusing on a disbarment case against her. Not surprisingly, she happens to be a front-running outsider—the president’s own justice secretary.
Secretary Leila de Lima has earned her disbarment honors precisely for challenging the court of yet-to-be-impeached Renato Corona, a court that counts him among its majority, a majority composed of justices appointed by Gloria Arroyo, a president being held to account for her scandal-ridden regime by her successor, for whom de Lima, like any other Cabinet member, acts as an alter ego. She refused to obey an order by the Supreme Court allowing Arroyo, its own effective creator, to fly away, potentially out of reach of Philippine justice; de Lima reasoned that the order had been inadequately served, not to mention obviously railroaded.
The chain of patronage is itself too obvious to be ignored, indeed too dangerous, for it consolidates the power and culture of injustice.
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