MANILA, Philippines - In a departure from tradition, the Inquirer named an entire institution, the Supreme Court, as Filipino of the Year in 2001. The recognition, in large part, was for the extraordinary role the high court played, in the immediate aftermath of People Power II, to keep the ship of state on even keel. The Court, in a word, saved the Republic at a difficult, tumultuous time.

Will we come to hold the Supreme Court in the same high regard a year from now?

The unsettling question forces itself on us, now that the public has come to realize that in 2009 President Macapagal-Arroyo will have the opportunity to fill as many as seven vacancies in the Supreme Court. This is an enormous responsibility, and one which, perhaps in an earlier time, President Arroyo herself would have shrunk from.

In her Rizal Day 2002 speech renouncing the opportunity to run for President in her own right, and in several speeches afterwards, Ms Arroyo acknowledged that her participation in the events that led to Edsa II and that ended with her assumption of the presidency made her a politically divisive figure. There was, in the words of Jose de Venecia, then the Speaker of the House, too much poison in the air.

That divisiveness remains, because we are still suffering through the post-impeachment era. Indeed, the President has only become a more divisive and a vastly more unpopular figure since she was sworn into office, in her own right, in 2004. Even her decision to pardon deposed president Joseph Estrada last year, after he was convicted on plunder charges, failed to appease Estrada’s many supporters or consolidate her base.

But she continues to hold the reins of power, and next year she will appoint as many as seven new Supreme Court justices. Expect the levels of toxicity to shoot up.

Does this mean we can only expect partisan appointments, justices more loyal to the President than to the Constitution? Not necessarily. We must point out that her elevation of both Artemio Panganiban and Reynato Puno to the honor and office of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was not exactly in her best, most partisan interest. We should also note that some of her own appointments, such as Antonio Carpio or even Adolfo Azcuna (whom we originally opposed) have voted time and again against the administration in critical cases. Even an appointee perceived in many quarters as possibly too beholden to the President, like Dante Tinga, has displayed a capacity to surprise the Palace. In the recent case involving the Memorandum of Agreement on ancestral domain, for instance, Tinga voted on procedural grounds (thus aligning with the Palace position) but wrote a vigorous opinion that, among other things, found the MOA categorically unconstitutional (thus undermining the Palace strategy).

The high court has also had a history of justices finding greatness in dissent, in turning against their appointing power and into history’s light. Claudio Teehankee, to give only one famous example, was appointed to the Court by Ferdinand Marcos (was in fact and for over a year Marcos’ own secretary of justice)—but he came to symbolize the legal opposition to the Marcosian brand of constitutional authoritarianism.

Dissenters, however, are necessarily lonely voices; they very rarely convince the rest of the Court. And today’s secretary of justice, Raul Gonzalez, is the most partisan in memory; he has effectively politicized the administration of justice. Not least, President Arroyo has learned to make the nominally independent Judicial and Bar Council a virtual adjunct of her office. She has the power to ignore the JBC’s recommendations until her preferred choice appears on the list of recommendees, and it is a power she will not hesitate to use.

That means that the question of a justice’s loyalties is really a question of character. An appointee the public objects to can surprise even the most extreme critic; an appointee with sterling qualifications can disappoint with unbecoming timidity and lack of independence.

We in the Inquirer continue to believe that an appointment to the Supreme Court is an invitation to greatness; because a justice does not run for political office and is usually already an eminent and well-compensated member of the bar, appointees are accountable only to their conscience and the Constitution. Millions of Filipinos will be watching the Court closely, to praise the worthy and criticize those who fail. Count us among them.