Congressional allies of President Aquino impeached Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona on Monday in an unprecedented record time of one day.
With stunning swiftness unparalleled in the history of impeachment in this country, 188 members of the House of Representatives voted to impeach Corona for interfering in the prosecution of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, comprising more than one-third of the 285 House members, a requirement under the Constitution to impeach a high official.
The rushed impeachment broke several impeachment procedures and historical precedents. First of all, it made Corona the first Filipino chief justice to be impeached; the impeachment marked the first attack on the independence of the Supreme Court through the combined power of both the Executive and Legislative departments in a conspiracy that unleashed a juggernaut to crush the head of the high court as well as to make it subservient to the Chief Executive.
Too many breaches of normal democratic procedures involved in the relationship of checks and balances between the judicial and political branches (the Executive and Legislative) have occurred in the holy crusade claimed to make past officials accountable and to remove officials, notably the Chief Justice for allegedly blocking the administration’s anti-corruption efforts.
These breaches have raised legitimate concerns and questions over whether the impeachment of Corona has already pushed the country down the path of a tyrannical rule by a populist regime disguised as part of the drive to exact accountability for past misdeeds.
Breaches of regular procedures and irregular short-cuts on due process arising from the strikes by the President on the Supreme Court and its leadership, which is accused of protecting the interests of the previous president, have to be highlighted to make the Filipino people aware of the dangers they pose.
The most alarming of these breaches are:
First, in the gang-up by the Executive and the House, the impeachment case took only three hours on Monday to produce the 57-page Articles of Impeachment of Corona. The collection of signatures of congressmen on the articles to have the necessary number was done all day on Monday. The signatures came from the three main party groupings coalesced with the President’s Liberal Party to form the administration’s majority in the House.
In their impatience with normal procedures and in compliance with the wish of President Aquino, the House discarded the previous procedure used in the impeachment of former President Joseph Estrada in 2000.
Showing how subservient the House was to President Aquino, the majority forgot the principle of the independence of the legislature vis-à-vis the Executive. They bypassed the normal procedure that requires an impeachment complaint to first be assessed by the House committee on justice, which then sends it to the plenary.
This bypass violated a fundamental principle in parliamentary democracy that says Congress is a deliberative body in which public debate is critically essential. This time, procedures were summarily discarded to please an angry and impatient President who was offended by Corona’s midnight appointment as chief justice by Arroyo near the end of her term and by the series of decisions of a high court packed by Arroyo
appointees which favored Arroyo’s interests.
During the impeachment of Estrada, there was a full-fledged debate in the plenary before it finally voted to impeach and transmit the result to the Senate for trial. This time, the impeachment decision transmitted to the Senate yesterday (Tuesday) suffers from an infirmity that opens it to legal challenge.
The impeachment of Corona came nearly two weeks after the President went on a public vilification of Corona, whom he denounced for being partial in cases involving Arroyo, whom he pledged to send to jail by Christmas.
The President’s attack on Corona at the National Criminal Justice Summit on Dec. 5, at which he publicly humiliated the Chief Justice, was the signal for the start of the preparation of the impeachment action against him.
Speaker Feliciano Belmonte said the impeachment “is a very important, grave and historical” decision. He had hastily called a caucus of the LP and its party-list partners which, three hours later, produced the articles of impeachment. Belmonte said, “We realize the gravity of this decision.”
The party caucus supplanted the plenary. True, it is a “grave and historical” decision, but not in the way Belmonte sees it, but in the ironic sense that in rushing the impeachment, the House made a watershed decision that sealed the subservience of the legislature (or at least half of it) to the Executive.
Belmonte and another LP congressman, Joseph E. Abaya, revealed that a “furious” President Aquino wanted a “fast impeachment” against Corona. Belmonte said the President was infuriated after the high court issued a TRO on the travel ban issued by the justice department on Arroyo.
Belmonte and his cohorts surrendered the independence of the legislature to the President. In the conflict over Corona’s impeachment, the independence of two institutions—the judiciary and the legislature—has been impaired.