Partisan idiocies spawned by Sereno and Robredo

BY ANTONIO P. CONTRERAS ON MAY 12, 2018

CRITICS of President Duterte have made it their pastime to make fun of the intellectual capacities of his supporters, who are largely drawn from the masses. Elitist slurs are inflicted on them by people who flaunt their intellectual pedigrees and their moral ascendancy. We saw people from academia, from the arts, and from all kinds of professions demean the rational capacity of anyone who supports the President. “What happened to you?” is the question that is always asked of those from these exalted classes who take his side by their flabbergasted peers, as if it is against natural law, or common sense, or simple logic. “I am trying hard to understand you,” is a kinder version of this, though still blatantly patronizing.

After all, to the perfumed and washed elites, from those living in the gated communities, to the denizens of academia, to those who circulate in art circles, taking the side of the President is something that only the blindly loyal, or the utterly ignorant can muster.

And it took the cases of Maria Lourdes Sereno and a Leni Robredo to unmask the pretentiousness of these so-called rational elites and intellectuals.

It boggles the mind how those learned in law, some of whom are even former justices themselves, can inflict so much noise to mislead the public just to defend Sereno. They talk of the quo warranto proceedings against a chief justice as unconstitutional because they argue that only an impeachment can remove such from office, even if the constitutional provision did not use “only” and is worded in such a way that relevant impeachment is just one option, but not the only option. These legal scholars would know that there is an ocean of difference in statutory construction between the words “may” and “shall,” and it is a fact that the Constitution used the former and not the latter when it talked about impeachment.

It behooves us to ask what legal fiction is being peddled when they say that only an impeachment proceeding can remove a chief justice, when there is also the possibility of early retirement, resignation, physical and mental incapacitation, and death. Besides, one has to search every morsel of logic emanating from the words and intent of the Constitution where it is implied that the chief justice is non-removable by any other means, when the President and the Vice President who are impeachable officials can be removed through quo warranto manifested in an election contest.

These legal scholars, because some of them are even members and heads of faculties of law of noted universities, are conveniently careless in not doing their legal research on the prevailing jurisprudence where impeachable officials have in fact been removed by other means, including quo warranto. In Nacionalista Party v. Bautista No. L-3452 decided on December 7, 1949, the Supreme Court ruled that a quo warranto proceeding is the proper remedy to test the right to an office. Instead of shedding light on the distinction between a quo warranto proceeding which is under the province of the Courts on matters pertaining to qualifications, and an impeachment proceeding over which Congress has jurisdiction on matters pertaining to impeachable offenses committed while already holding an impeachable position, these agents of the law have muddled further the issue by alleging that the court will violate the Constitution if it takes cognizance of and decides the quo warranto petition questioning Sereno’s proper appointment to her office.

Furthermore, it is also patently bizarre that people with legal training, some of whom are members of Congress, can even mislead ordinary citizens when they claim that a quo warranto prescribes one year after the assumption of office of the one being petitioned. Section 11 of Rule 66 of the Rules of Court explicitly states that prescription is reckoned from the time the cause of an ouster arose, which in this case is the discovery of the disqualifying circumstances surrounding Sereno’s appointment to the post of chief justice. The claim that it should commence from the time a contested office is assumed, in fact, does not apply in this case since the petitioner is not an individual who was denied the right to such office, but the State through the Solicitor General.

Another watershed of what can be construed as a grave betrayal of logic and reason by people who should otherwise know better is the issue of the proper shading of the ovals in the ballots during the 2016 elections. This is in relation to the electoral protest of former Senator Bongbong Marcos against Robredo who currently holds the position of Vice President. It befuddles the mind why otherwise intelligent persons, some of whom are academics, professionals and writers, can unproblematically accept the proposition that the rule that was used by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) was a shading threshold of at least 25 percent. This is despite the fact that there was no Comelec resolution prior to the 2016 elections that effectively said so, and that what was adopted during the 2010 and 2013 elections was a 50 percent minimum threshold.

An intelligent mind would already wonder why is it that only the Robredo voters have this shading problem and would have wantonly ignored instructions on proper voting prominently repeated by COMELEC in various media, propounded by election watchdogs such as the PPCRV, and popularized in media outlets. A rational mind would already be suspicious of why is there no single document which Comelec can present to the Presidential Electoral Tribunal authorizing a change in the threshold prior to the elections, and what it has is a resolution affirming what appeared to be an opinion by one of its Commissioners four months after the elections.

Critics of the President took pleasure in maligning the intelligence and logic of ordinary citizens who support the President. They demeaned Duterte supporters for their alleged blind idolatry and accused them of actively peddling misleading falsehoods.

It seems that this partisan-rooted flaw is not a one-sided affair. It is also seen in those who purport to have intelligent and rational minds, those who have the audacity to slander Duterte supporters for alleged idiocies, when they abandon their logic if only to defend Sereno and Robredo. And unlike Duterte supporters who proudly wear their partisanship, these Sereno and Robredo apologists try so hard to maintain that they are the objective observers, which they are not.

http://www.manilatimes.net/partisan-idiocies-spawned-by-sereno-and-robredo/398197/