Civility

This is all so sad. Our nation’s political life, it seems, has lost all sense of civility. The barbarians who were at the gates now overwhelm the public square.

The events this past week saw the Supreme Court pitted against the executive branch. The whole nation looked into the abyss of a paralyzing constitutional crisis.

The Court, as we know, issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) on the Department of Justice’s strange interpretation of the “watch list order” as a means to draw an iron curtain on citizen’s freedom of movement independent of the courts. A TRO always had immediate effect, being an instrument to mitigate what might be an act of injustice or a trampling of rights.

The administration, however, decided to maintain its travel ban on former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. The Secretary of Justice argued that the administration’s side should first be heard by way of oral arguments on the matter. That is exactly the position of the dissenting opinion at the High Court which lost in the vote. The Secretary of Justice, by the principle of separation of powers, has no vote on the bench.

Under a regime of laws, the highest court of the land has final interpretation of what is right, whether or not that interpretation is popular. In a tripartite system of government, all the branches are commanded to obey. The rule of law frays when the other branches of government hew and haw in the face of an order by the Court. The rule of the mob rears its ugly head.

The vital fulcrum of the rule of law is the recognition of the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of all contentious legal and constitutional issues. Should it lose its standing as final arbiter then democracy falls apart.

The issues at this moment go beyond Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and her precarious health. It goes beyond her individual freedom to travel. The issues are now much larger.

Checks and balances in a tripartite government is a precarious condition. If the authority and autonomy of one branch of government erodes, the essential check against abuse of power is lost.

This controversy threatens to erode the Supreme Court’s proper standing as a co-equal branch of government. Should the Court allow this administration to get away with open defiance of its explicit order, it will lose turf it may never recover considering the mentality and essential source of legitimacy of this administration.

The administration has done its part prancing around the basic principles of logic. The spotlight is now on the Supreme Court, on how it can rise to defend its prerogatives and conserve its standing in a democratic arrangement.

In the first hours after the Court issued the controversial TRO, Palace mouthpieces tried to buy time using a highly contrived argument. As they ordered DOJ employees not to receive their copy of the TRO, they went on a media offensive declaring they cannot allow the former president to leave because they had not received their copy of the Court order.

My lawyer friends could only shake their heads in disbelief. There is nothing to read in a TRO. It simply suspends the application of a questioned DOJ order restricting the former president’s freedom of movement.

The next day, when receipt of the TRO could no longer be prolonged, the Palace changed its tune. The President’s people, lifting from the dissenting opinion of a sympathetic justice, began talking about the “rights” of the state.

Since I teach political philosophy, this argument strikes me as odd. The state has only one, albeit absolute, right: sovereignty. All other political rights are ceded to citizens in order to protect them from an unjust state.

Eventually, the presidential spokesman, after having earlier interpreted “right to life” as exclusively referring to the unborn thereby imploding the most basic of human rights, began saying that the Court did not allow the state “due process.” Here again there is misrepresentation of sacred democratic concepts.

Since it is the state that exercises power over the individual, “due process” is a right belonging to citizens to protect them from oppressive rule. To say the state, which has every means at its disposal to dictate processes, was deprived “due process” is, to say the least, absurd.

If Lacierda had, at all, qualified to attend my course on democratic theory, I would have been constrained to flunk him. That will be the only just course of action.

Today, the presidential mouthpiece poses a direct  if mindless  threat to the public’s understanding of what democracy is all about.

Add to Lacierda’s pedestrian perorations the threat aired by leftist groups allied with the administration to impose their own TRO on the Supreme Court TRO. Talk about mob rule. They chillingly recall the attitude of the Maoist Red Guards who tore down the vital institutions of their societies because they claimed to represent the “masses.” To this day, China has not yet fully recovered the institutional ability to assure rule of law.

To be sure, this week’s highly charged debate polarized opinion. It is not coincidental, however, that the line of division is between the learned and the philistine, the pedagogues and the demagogues. All the constitutional experts are alarmed by the way this administration conducted itself through this episode as it pandered to the mob at the expense of civil discourse.

Among the vital responsibilities of any government is to cultivate a civic culture that respects institutions, obeys laws, yields to proper authority and upholds people’s dignities. This administration has not been up to that task.