On the ‘rush to judgment’ by the Supreme Court

Former Rep. Lord Velasco, in a letter to the editor published last Monday, said that the Inquirer was “inaccurate and imprecise” when it spoke, among others, of a “tenuous one-vote majority in a divided court” that ruled in his favor against Rep. Regina Reyes in the most recent congressional derby in Marinduque.

The Dec. 23, 2013, editorial “Looming showdown” referred to the 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court in its decision of Oct. 22, 2013 (thus the “one-vote majority”), affirming its earlier decision of June 25, 2013, in which the vote was 7-4. The lead in the June decision that dissenting Justice Arturo Brion called “hasty and imprudent” and a “rush to judgment” had by October thinned to a one-vote lead (thus the adjective “tenuous”).

The other arguments raised by Lord Velasco are already answered in the editorial, all the way to his surprising puzzlement at why a candidate who won the majority of the votes and now holds office, hasn’t filed an election protest against the opponent who garnered fewer votes and is out of office. That would be bizarre, to say the least.

That said, Lord Velasco actually concurs with the editorial’s closing point that the “Reyes v. Velasco tiff [must] be confronted … without the emotional baggage of pork barrel,” though he will disagree with the reason, namely, because it “shows how rules and judicial reasoning are manipulated for partisan politics among the justices themselves.”—EDS.