President Aquino staging coup against Chief Justice Corona

In a record time of 18 months and 16 days, President Benigno Aquino III consolidated his powers by bringing under his control the executive branch and the House of Representative in the fastest period of consolidation ever achieved by any Filipino leader since the founding of the postwar republic in 1946.

This record is not even matched by Ferdinand Marcos, who clamped down a dictatorship with a proclamation of martial law in 1972, a year before the end of his second elected term.

This empirical fact is being cited in order to put in context the charge by the impeached Chief Justice Renato Corona on Thursday that the country was “teetering toward one-man rule” following the attack by the President against the Supreme Court and the Malacañang-initiated move to unseat Corona through impeachment in pursuit of his aim to rid Philippine society of corruption blamed on the previous administration.

Speaking to the national convention of the Philippine Women Judges Association, whose members demonstrated support for him, Corona said the President’s attacks sought to “shackle judicial independence, undermine the rule of law and erode the system of governance, particularly the principle of the mechanism of checks and balances” among the three branches of government.

In the action to impeach Corona, Mr. Aquino was able to combine the powers of the executive with those of the House. A total of 188 congressmen signed the articles of impeachment which they transmitted to the Senate for trial with extraordinary haste in three hours.

With that procedure, the scales of power were heavily tilted in favor of the two political branches, in which the judiciary and its independence found themselves extremely vulnerable to the assaults by the legislature and the executive, which has used its enormous resources of patronage and coercive powers to subjugate the congressmen to ram the impeachment to the Senate.

Although the Senate, acting as an impeachment court, is a constitutionally mandated body with independence and has tried, not without a struggle, to conduct a fair trial, adopting the procedures of due process under the rule of law, the fate of Corona is now in the hands of senator-judges who are themselves open to external blandishments.

These included officials from the President’s camp, which has gone into an aggressive public opinion campaign to try to influence the Senate court to convict Corona on charges of betrayal of public trust, graft and corruption and bias in protecting the corruption-ridden administration of former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

Corona is accused of accepting a “midnight appointment” as Chief Justice by Arroyo days before the newly elected President Aquino took his oath of office.

Due process

Mr. Aquino’s spokesperson, Edwin Lacierda, has dismissed Corona’s attack on the President for putting the country on the road of “one-man” rule as “ridiculous” on the ground that “democracy in this country has never been as vibrant as in the last decade. Compare this administration and the previous administration (and) you will see that this administration has always advocated democracy.”

This argument ignores and is refuted by events associated with the browbeating of members of Congress by the House leadership to rush the impeachment complaint to the Senate and the consequent subordination of the House to Malacañang through delays in the release of their pork barrel.

What is “vibrant” about a democracy in an administration that has shown little respect for due process for the accused in pushing its impeachment case?

The subjugation of the political branches to the executive and the attacks to undermine the independence the judiciary have emerged as an overriding issue in the impeachment trial, causing more concerns than the issues related to the contents of the statement of assets and liabilities and net worth of Corona now being minutely scrutinized bv the Senate tribunal.

Coup vs Chief Justice

These have become secondary to the concerns about giving the presidency concentration of powers that could negate the system of checks and balances as the anchor of Philippine democracy.

This concern was pointedly expressed by one senator-judge, Manuel Villar, who warned of a danger in undermining the independence of the judiciary.

“If the independence of the courts is destroyed, what institution will be left to which citizens can turn to protect them from abuses of power by government?” Villar said.

This issue of creeping accumulation of power by the President as a consequence of the impeachment trial of Corona came about after Mr. Aquino pressed for his removal from office following the midnight appointment case.

There had been conflicts between the presidency and the Supreme Court or between the Malacañang and Congress in the past, but this is the first time the President has acted to impeach the Chief Justice and attacked the independence of the judiciary. This attack is virtually a coup by the executive on the weakest branch of government—a clear case of bullying.

Normally, a coup is directed against a sitting government—not against the legislature and the judiciary, which are not the seats of state power.

This is an abnormal form of coup—a coup against the Chief Justice, staged by the head of state.

It is the most grotesque distortion ever to take place in a modern democracy.