Chrizo

Mudslinging is commonplace with politicians, not Chief Justices. The Court he leads is considered the “weakest branch,” holding neither the power of the purse nor the might of the sword but armed only with the wisdom of its words and the moral sway of its conscience.

For this reason, a justice is required to be of “proven competence, integrity, probity and independence.” Probity, that quality of having strong moral principles, honesty and decency, is fundamentally incompatible with slinging mud; on the other hand, probity is fundamentally compatible with slinging truth—even if, as it often does, the truth hurts.

Section 2 of RA 1379 explicitly states that “whenever any public officer or employee has acquired during his incumbency an amount of property which is manifestly out of proportion to his salary as such public officer or employee and to his other lawful income and the income from legitimately acquired property, said property shall be presumed prima facie to have been unlawfully acquired. x x x”

The elements which must concur for this prima facie presumption to apply are:
(1) the offender is a public officer or employee;
(2)he must have acquired a considerable amount of money or property during his incumbency; and
(3)said amount is manifestly out of proportion to his salary as such public officer or employee and to his other lawful income and the income from legitimately acquired property.

More than anything, the impeachment court is an attempt at accountability, to take account of men who are invincible for the sake of those who are not. The court’s power emanates not from the people, but from the court itself, from the faith of the public who live in fear and awe of gavels and robes. Once that faith is shaken, even the most formidable of justices cannot hand down decisions and expect to be believed. Bang the drums, start up the band, send in the clowns.

The impeachment court is meant to restore that awe. It is public, it is open to scrutiny, it is to be a display not so much of the national circus, but a demonstration of the grandest of democratic principles: the public will. The people elected the senator-judges, the rules make no exceptions, and the logic is that no man is too powerful to refuse a just accounting.

This is what the prosecutors forget every time they discredit Corona. They are not there to destroy a man by simply calling him a criminal, a liar and a thief, they are there to prove it in the clearest and most irreproachable way possible that this man by virtue of his sins has no right to run the nation’s highest court. The whole grandstanding lot of spokespersons and lawyers may win the 2013 elections by virtue of their prettily knotted ties, but they do nothing for the country by their sniping and retracting. So what, they ask, if they arranged the articles of impeachment wrong? So what if they declared the wrong totals, so what if the language is vague and the statements of assets and liabilities do not include their legendary 45 properties? The truths they claim depend on how they legitimize these truths in the face of an 82-year-old courtroom veteran who plays the media with the slickness of a Casanova.

It has to do with achievements in defiling institutions upon which our democracy stands. Of our tripartite system, because the judiciary is not periodically answerable to an electorate and is thus insulated from such self-cleansing mechanisms as elections, it enjoys a relative degree of perpetuity. Defile the judiciary and you perpetually defile democracy.

Fortunately, the Constitution affords us a singular remedy—impeachment.

The face-off we now see re-calibrates our separation of powers and restores the executive’s proper place as the source of leadership. Since 1986, the fall of the dictatorship has fostered a knee-jerk bias against executive power and in favor of judicial checks and balances. But this has led to government by stalemate, the primacy of procedure over results, where due process is misunderstood as endless process.
This is the best time to correct that. Cory didn’t want to; it was too soon after Marcos. Fidel Ramos preferred to do it behind-the-scenes, efficiently but not institutionally. Erap took to rhetoric, called them “hoodlums in robes” but didn’t stay long enough to disrobe them. Gloria Arroyo alone had the gumption to flex executive muscle upfront; alas she possessed Machiavellian virtù but not true virtue. And comes now Noynoy, riding the crest of popularity for his anti-corruption campaign.