There is hardly any question that the (5-4) majority decision of the Senate Electoral Tribunal (SET) deeming Sen. Grace Poe a natural-born Filipino was a political exercise. Anyone who thought otherwise has lost touch with the reality that the SET membership was designed to be nothing else but precisely that. It is composed of nine members: three supposedly neutral Supreme Court justices; the rest are openly partisan senators.
The three magistrates are there merely to tame and dissuade the six politicians from getting carried away with partisan politics. If they are ignored, their legal opinions are simply “noted,” as it were. The Constitution obviously puts the savvy of the six senators who were elected by the people notches higher than whatever predilections the unelected three members thereof may have.
Which brings up the question about the finality of a decision made by the SET, supposedly the “sole judge of all contests relating to the election, returns and qualifications” of a senator (Article VI, Section 17, 1987 Constitution). But per its own self-serving dictum, the Supreme Court assumes the power to set aside an SET judgment and put its own in place “upon a clear showing of arbitrary and improvident use of the power as will constitute a denial of due process of law.” And who determines such “arbitrariness”? The Supreme Court itself, of course!
Just as the Constitution has vested in the Senate the “sole power to try and decide all cases of impeachment”—i.e., “sole judge” [Article XI. Section 3 (6)]—supposedly enjoining the Supreme Court against interfering with its judgment, should not the same respect be accorded the judgment of the SET? In the impeachment case against ousted chief justice Renato Corona, no one dared to have the Senate’s guilty verdict appealed to the Court despite vehement allegations of “denial of due process” from his lawyers and despite an overabundance of sympathy in that Court for its embattled colleague! Well, everyone else seemed to have understood what the Constitution plainly meant. It was a political, not a judicial, proceeding. So, why is the same phrase interpreted differently when it comes to a politically-driven disposition of the SET?
With this judicial legerdemain, the Court can overturn a constitutionally ordained bias for a political solution and thus may well render Poe’s SET victory more chimerical than real. Given the fact that the three Supreme Court justices share the opinion that
Poe is not a natural-born Filipino, all they need to trash the SET
decision is the vote of just five more like-minded members in the Supreme Court to attain a majority of eight who can tell the five senators to their faces that they did not know what they were doing, and to heck with the Constitution!
That’s how simple it is for a few unelected/unelectable justices to nullify the tens of millions of votes cast in favor of a topnotcher in the last senatorial race. To be sure, it would not be the first time the Supreme Court gave short shrift to a self-evident constitutional mandate and shoved its own “interpretation” down the people’s throats!
—GEORGE DEL MAR,
gdmlaw111@gmail.com