The show must go on

He stands on the steps of the Supreme Court, dressed in black, surrounded by a crowd of supporters chanting his name.

I love you too, says Chief Justice Renato Corona.

The Chief Justice is arrogant. Perhaps arrogance is necessary to become the man whose business is truth, but he is a brave man as well. He has chosen to stand against a President who has the power to diminish the Judiciary. If Corona is innocent, his arrogance can be forgiven, and the courts can call him chief. If he is guilty, and the courts agree, it is the public who will punish him, and his children who will bear the shame.

He speaks like a politician defending his seat on election week. They do nothing but attempt to frighten me, he says. They say I stand in the way. It is true. I stand in the way of those who would choose not to give farmers their land in Hacienda Luisita. I stand in the way of the man who rushes for the vice presidency but lost in 2010. I stand in the way of the man who would be chief justice. The three of them are in cahoots to throw me out of power. I stand in the way of dictatorship. They are jealous of the doctorate I worked for, they seek to bring me down.

Those who defend him cry unfairness. He is treated without respect, they say, and the courts he leads are marked by the same disrespect. But it should not be forgotten that the Chief Justice is not an ordinary man, and the law, blind as it is in defense of the ordinary, has acknowledged that this is an extraordinary man whose wrongs and rights should be judged by other laws. There is a court for the powerful, and it is called the impeachment court. The standards are higher, because the stakes are higher. The punishment is not jail, it is the stripping of the power that makes kings of ordinary men. Betrayal of the public trust, graft and corruption and culpable violation of the Constitution are not the sins of ordinary men, because ordinary men do not hold the public trust or determine the course of the lives of millions.

It is a different justice, one that presidents and judges need to live in fear of, even if they muster thousands of supporters carrying black balloons or phalanxes of defenders with ready answers.

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.

This is not a fight between good and evil, no matter how the prosecution is painted. It is, in the end, an attempt to grasp the truth behind all the “supposeds” and “allegeds” and “it was reported.” In spite of a continuing objection, the defense is there to defend their chief. Corona has chosen to fight, and this is good, because the resignation of an embattled chief claiming innocence is the worst of possible outcomes. Corona’s resignation will mean the circus has had its way, and will continue its march to merry mayhem. Every justice thereafter will live in fear not of the law, but of the mob.

What is missing, in the discourse of the courtroom, is why this all matters. What is wrong with undervalued properties, what is the danger of misdeclaring, why the brouhaha over registrars and 62-square-meter condominiums? If this is a court of the people, then the prosecutors—themselves confused by their own articles or impeachment—are compelled to explain why this is relevant to the public trust.

This is written not in defense of Corona, whose innocence or guilt is a matter for the court to decide, but in defense of due process and institutions overcome by the weight of political interest. The stage is lit, the curtains are up, and the occasion is there to disprove the generally accepted truth that the nation’s politicians are self-interested opportunists who will step into their tutus once the ringmaster sails into the sawdust. That Corona has chosen to pander to the crowd and howl with the mob is nobody’s problem but his, he will be judged for it, the same way as the men who judge him. This is written in the sincerest hope that when the bleachers empty, the court will stand.