It would help
Renato Corona stuck to drama. Before he returned to the impeachment court last Friday, his handlers had been portraying him as someone courageously bucking heaven and earth, disbelief and derision, disease of the body and disease of the mind, just to comply with the court’s wishes. He was even defying his own doctors to be able to do so. They had asked him to sign a waiver exculpating them from blame should he collapse in his seat from a heart attack, hypoglycemia, high blood pressure, a stroke or a lightning bolt. He had done so. Boys don’t cry, but hardy men do.
He came in looking frail and depleted, with doctors and nurses in attendance. He had refused a wheelchair, which made you wonder if he wanted to project the image of a man trying to overcome the odds or to avoid more text jokes about “justice on wheels” and/or caricatures of him along with Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on his-and-hers wheelchairs wearing neck braces. He had to be helped to his chair, and then prefaced his reappearance by explaining his disappearance three days earlier, he spoke weakly, his voice dipping to the lowest registers and quivering at emotional moments. And he spoke about emotion: How in the grip of oppression of man and Nature, of being accused wrongfully and being assailed medically, he had done what he did.
Fine, except for one thing. He still doesn’t know how to act.
He stuck to drama, or indeed to theatrics, and thereby rested his whole testimony on credibility. He would of course withdraw his condition that Sen. Franklin Drilon and the 188 complainant-representatives sign a waiver on their own bank accounts, peso or dollar, but that still spoke of theatrics. As several lawyers pointed out, it was a little late in the day. The following week being the time for prosecution and defense to wrap up their arguments, it no longer mattered. It was one last-ditch double-or-nothing gamble with really nothing to lose. At least for this impeachment. Because the waiver could be used later, as other lawyers hastened to point out, to prosecute him criminally if his deposits belied his claims.
He stuck to drama, or indeed to the dramatics and produced the most conflicting, or contradictory, images of himself.
He had projected himself as the font of legal knowledge, if not of wisdom and the embodiment of moral principle, having taken up the cudgels for the tenants of Hacienda Luisita, for which he had suffered persecution. Yet his explanation for the chasm between his stated income, for which he paid taxes, and his actual possessions, for which he did not, subverts it completely.
By his own admission, he has $2.4 million—which he finally revealed to dispute the Ombudsman’s charge that he had $12 million—and P80 million in banks. He declared neither in his SALNs. In the case of the dollars, that was so presumably because legally public officials are not required to declare their dollars, and morally because he acquired the sum painstakingly over the years. In the case of the second, that was so presumably because it was not his own money, it was a “commingling” of his own funds with that of his wife and the Basas. Both arguments rule out his fitness to be a public official, never mind chief justice.
On legal grounds alone, is the Chief Justice advocating that all public officials not declare their dollar deposits? His explanation about how he acquired his own dollar accounts does not make it better, it makes it worse. Far, far worse. He did say in his (long) spiel last Tuesday that his experience with the Basas had made him and his wife allergic to owning properties. So they decided instead “to invest in dollars.” That means that, unlike those who own lands and businesses, the bulk of their fortune is in their dollar deposits. You are the chief justice and you think it is perfectly legal and moral, perfectly acceptable in the eyes of heaven and earth, to not pay taxes on it?
Who freaking cares if he acquired the $2.4 million—assuming it’s only that—by scrimping and saving? That’s asset, that’s taxable. While at that, the rest of us mere mortals can assure him you can’t raise that kind of money simply by depositing the butal from your trips abroad. Which not quite incidentally brought out another clashing image: between the “We do not come from ordinary families” that Corona earlier used to justify owning Bellagio-type houses and the “Simple lang kami, we don’t even have a maid” that Corona used last Friday to justify paying only ordinary-family taxes.
As to the peso accounts, you are the Chief Justice and you don’t know that deposits that appear in your name are presumed by law to be yours? You’re the Chief Justice and you don’t know that when you issue a check, no one will ask you, “Ah, yes but are your funds pure or commingled?”
But in the end, the most conflicting and contradictory image of all was Corona claiming to be sick and trying to look kaawa-awa and his sudden recovery when revived by Miriam Defensor-Santiago, who asked about the impact of the impeachment on the separation of powers. But who got a little peeved when he took a melodramatic swerve and talked instead about the impact it had on his grandson. The text messages flew thick and fast. “Does that look like someone who’s sick?” asked one. A lawyer friend of mine, Bobby Lara, said more insightfully, “Have you noticed pards that everyone, from Marcos to Erap, from Gloria to Corona, is suddenly stricken by a life-threatening disease when they fall from power? Yet none of them has died from it.”
Corona himself put it this way when he pleaded for understanding for his walkout last Tuesday. “Kailangan pa bang mamatay para paniwalaan?” (Do you have to die to be believed?)
What can I say? It would help.
