IT IS LESS than a year before the filing of certificates of candidacy for elective offices in October 2021.
The country has been reeling from one calamity to another but there is constant drumbeating from the camp of former senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to roil a sense of urgency in the proceedings before the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) and snatch from the jaws of mootness his pending protest in the 2016 vice presidential contest.
A major obstacle is blocking this plan. Associate Justice Mario Victor Leonen is the assigned justice-in-charge of the electoral protest.
This is a problem because Justice Leonen is not known to be easily swayed by the government’s arguments in political cases.
He was one of those who disagreed with the burial of the remains of ousted President Ferdinand Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani despite President Duterte’s aggressive endorsement of the move that was seen by objectors as part of the grand design to revise history and eventually restore the Marcos family to the pinnacle of political power.
Justice Leonen was also among the justices who dissented to the removal of Ma. Lourdes Sereno as chief justice via quo warranto, a previously unheard-of recourse to remove an impeachable officer from office. Sereno incurred the ire of the administration when she asserted the Supreme Court’s exclusive authority to investigate and discipline members of the judiciary who were publicly shamed by President Duterte for their alleged involvement in illegal drugs.
In July this year, Justice Leonen disagreed with the decision of his colleagues to dismiss outright a citizen’s petition to require the President to disclose the status of his health.
In a strongly worded dissent, Justice Leonen warned his colleagues against the fast erosion of judicial independence which makes the Supreme Court “vulnerable to a charge that we have ceased to be a sentinel of the fundamental rights of the sovereign people and enrobed ourselves with the garments of servility.”
He added that the majority acted “as if this Court itself supplied the arguments for the ease and convenience of the government…such a posture is procedurally unacceptable and may leave an impression that the Bench has lost its independence.”
Now back to the protest. The PET has directed the Commission on Elections and the Solicitor General to comment on Marcos’ final cause of action, which is to nullify the election results for vice president in the provinces of Basilan, Maguindanao and Lanao del Sur. He claims that the voters there were terrorized, intimidated and harassed to vote for Robredo during the 2016 elections.
The Comelec in its comment confirmed that there had been no declaration of a failure of elections in any of those areas. In fact, while it acknowledged that the PET can nullify those results being the sole judge of protests contesting the two top elective positions of the land, the Comelec cautioned against the exercise of such power sans evidence of any widespread fraud.
The Solicitor General, however, argued in favor of nullification and even advocated Justice Leonen’s inhibition from the case, in eerie harmony with a similar motion filed by Marcos’ lawyers. One motion is almost the mirror image of the other.
The Palace was less than subtle in its support of the twin motions. The President’s spokesman Harry Roque said last week that the Solicitor General’s motion for Justice Leonen’s inhibition from the vice-presidential election protest case “had to be filed” for the benefit of the Filipino people.
Roque explained that the OSG was created to serve as legal counsels for the people. “I suppose the motion had to be filed because it is the interest of our people to know who really won in the elections for the vice president,” he added.
It was Congress that proclaimed both the President and the Vice President after canvassing statements of votes emanating from all over the country. It is that proclamation, an act of a branch of government, that is effectively being challenged before the PET. It was Congress that informed us of who won in the elections.
It is thus both logical and legal that the Solicitor General, as counsel for the Republic, should support the proclamation rather than oppose it.
But in a series of acts that are as unprecedented as his other befuddling acts under the current dispensation, the Solicitor General defies convention and forcefully takes issue with the duly proclaimed vice president and a sitting justice of the Supreme Court. The question is, will the Supreme Court indulge him?/PN
