EDITORIAL - Legal vending machines

Rep. Pablo John Garcia has threatened to have all Cebu City councilors who are lawyers disbarred if they pursue an ordinance whose effect will be a virtual ban on development within province-owned lots in the city, particularly within the Banilad-Talamban corridor.

According to Garcia, the ordinance would expose the lawyer-councilors as being ignorant of the law. The second in the Garcia family to top the bar exams says such an ordinance would be unconstitutional and therefore unfit to see the light of day.

Let us leave the legality or constitutionality of the issue to judicial interpretation, if it comes to that. But opinions can be made and shared at will in this free country, even if they can be quite hurting and insulting.

We, however, will not go as far as sharing with Garcia the “ignorant of the law” tag he reserves for the lawyer-councilors, even if we must admit it is quite tempting to do so, for the simple reason that the law is not within our field of expertise.

However, while the limits of our own legal expertise prevent us from calling others ignorant of the law, we are pretty certain that the lawyer-councilors referred to by Garcia are a little infirm in meeting public expectations regarding their mandate as lawmakers.

Consider for instance the very issue that has incurred the ire of Garcia. Most, if not all, of the lawyer-councilors he refers to have been warming their seats for a considerable while and yet not one of them had any inkling on what to do until their boss said so.

Not until Tomas Osmeña asked them to craft an ordinance that would virtually ban any development of province-owned lots in the “Ban-Tal” area did it occur to anyone of them to do precisely that.

But when ordered to do so, never has the city seen such a flurry of activity that managed to move along the ordered ordinance in record time, making us wonder which is more insulting, to be called “ignorant of the law” or “legal vending machines.”