Follow the leader in breaking the law

When the iconoclast W.C. Fields was caught reading the Bible, he quickly clarified, "Just looking for loopholes." Traditional politicians, too, look for loopholes in the law in aspiring for office. Their blatant early campaign ads are an example.

Technically, Sen. Panfilo Lacson is not breaking the provision of the Election Code on premature campaigning. He may have declared himself available for the Presidency, but his television ads do not directly exhort voters to go for him. He has not yet filed a certificate of candidacy, so he is not deemed covered by the provision. The campaign period has yet to start 90 days before Election Day. Besides, he claims, the ads were spent for by unnamed friends who only wish to refute the bad press he’s been getting.

Arguably, however, Lacson is violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. His early ads give him undue advantage in publicity mileage over potential contenders who would rather abide by the Code. Ironically, the ads aim to portray Lacson as a stern man of the law and the best PNP chief the country ever had. By going around the law, the message is not lost to thinking Filipinos that certain cops would resort to summary execution in the name of peace and order.

Still, a problem arises: How many unsophisticated minds would now follow Lacson’s bad example of exploiting legal loopholes? One is reminded of the indictee who, having killed his parents, pleads with the judge for clemency on the grounds that he is now an orphan. Such chutzpa is spreading. Squatters demand "disturbance fee" when ordered to vacate private lots they illegally occupied. A mayor opposes the designation of a government hospital in his city as a SARS referral center because it is his avowed duty to protect his constituents from disease. A woman wails on TV, after her husband with stashed terrorist explosives shoots it out with soldiers, that the troops had the gall to break down her door.

Lacson’s is not the only case in point. Other senators wave loopholes over the law. Minority members, for instance, want the Blue-Ribbon committee to investigate a lawyer of the First Couple. The demand is based solely on a privilege speech of Sen. Edgardo Angara. The speech, in turn, is based on a voice tape, taken illegally, of a German consultant claiming to his principals in Fraport AG that the lawyer had asked for money to fix the Piatco case. Sen. Joker Arroyo, as committee chairman, refuses to be part of the obvious hearsay. But stretching a loophole, the Minority says he must, by Senate tradition, at least accept the case first before judging if there’s merit to it.

Wait a minute. Isn’t it also Senate tradition for its members to at least verify first the contents of their speeches? That German consultant denies having been asked to cough up any money. Before the senators invoke tradition for a crooked cause, they could first study tradition’s finer aims. That would cool down their malicious intentions.

The propensity of senators for procedural loopholes has infected the feeble-minded House of Representatives from where most of them came. A bipartisan gang of congressmen now wants to impeach the Supreme Court justices for voiding the PEA-Amari and Piatco contracts. Their reason: the justices wilfully violated the Constitution’s article on separation of powers of coequal government branches when they reversed earlier House rulings that the contracts were valid. Without discounting that the congressmen’s opinions were bought in the first place, their impeachment move would be an interesting sight. Their partymates in the Senate, too, had earlier judged the contracts as flawed. Let’s see the congressmen impeach the senators first.

The combined circus of the Senate and the House in turn infect the rest if the population. And it’s no longer funny, but ridiculous.

A professor of the Ateneo Law School offered his services to Joseph Estrada with a new line of defense in the plunder case. The ploy is to question the jurisdiction of the Sandiganbayan to try the case when Estrada is still, in the lawyer’s opinion, still the President at present. The professor would want to teach students that a lower court can overturn a higher one, for the Supreme Court no less already ruled thrice that Estrada had constructively yielded his position to Vice President Gloria Arroyo in January 2001.

While the public may be entertained by that lawyer, many suffer from copycats of the high and mighty. An executive of Lepanto Mines, for instance, who was dismissed after 11 years of faithful service, won a P2-million partial judgment from the National Labor Relations Commission. Company lawyers ran to the Court of Appeals, but lost again. The NLRC thus ordered Lepanto to pay the accrued wages. But following the sterling example of national leaders, the lawyers now advise their chairman to ignore the lawful order until they find a new loophole. Never mind the legal deadlines. Never mind the morale, too, of other executives who have long served the company but are now seeing how they could likewise be shabbily treated.

The copycats can be deadlier, if uneducated. Vigilantes in Central Mindanao, for instance, blew up electricity towers because the military refused to arm them against marauding Islamic separatists. They believed it their right to defend themselves with rifles, and their right too to show their indignation.

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