Charlatans cornering the party list

“Who ‘bastardized’ the party-list?” asked former chief justice Artemio Panganiban   (Opinion, 6/2/19), lamenting how, after he retired in 2006, the Supreme Court junked jurisprudence he helped establish.

Let us break it down in very simple terms, shorn of all the gobbledygook  that court decisions are often so needlessly laden with, and just try a modicum of plain common sense.

Republic Act No. 7941 granted party list representation in Congress to “Filipino citizens belonging to the marginalized or underrepresented sectors” who can never win in  any regular election due to lack of resources. The Commission on Elections (Comelec) interpreted that mandate exactly  according to the plain language of that law and the prevailing jurisprudence then.   It disqualified overprivileged (rich and powerful) nominees who did not belong to those underprivileged sectors (poor and powerless).

The Supreme Court virtually amended that law in a 2013 decision to mean that even nominees not belonging to those sectors are not necessarily disqualified if they can show a “track record of advocacy” for such sectors.

The economic status of such nominees is irrelevant. Huh?

Thus, we now have all kinds of charlatans and “shenaniganizers”  (billionaires and millionaires) cornering the party list, to the exclusion of  bona fide members of the underrepresented sectors—by simply pretending to have “advocacies” for them!  Congress and the Comelec saw it coming and insisted on “belongingness” as a primordial requirement. Alas, brilliant minds in the Supreme Court, including then Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, did not?

SCARLET S. SYTANGCO, [email protected]