Heal thyself

This question boggles the minds of citizens anxious about the nation’s future: Who will we trust to redeem us from this quagmire?

We live in a time of ravaged institutions. It is as if a horde of barbarians swept in and desecrated everything in sight. The economy might still be holding fast, but the Republic is in ruins.

We might have broken the insidious cycle of boom and bust that kept our economy underdeveloped. In its place, however, we have been treated to a long sequence of political administrations that ended up in the same way: in flames.

At no time previously have our people been asked to deal with a crisis of institutions as serious as the one we now confront. Those we rely on to ferret out the truth are the very ones accused of crimes. The ones we trusted to govern us well have betrayed us.

There is an ancient Greek adage that sums up the futility that often visits human affairs: Doctor, heal thyself!

Can we rely on the same damaged institutions currently shaken by scandal to redeem our governance? Will we invest more trust on leaders who have violated it in every conceivable way? Those who looted the public treasury, albeit on some officious excuse, will we depend on them to lead us to fiscal sanity?

Never before have the integrity and independence of our institutions been so blatantly debased across the board as they have been today.

The path to institutional erosion began alarmingly. The Aquino administration went after the sitting Ombudsman, seeking to impeach her. She chose to quit than be demonized.

Emboldened, the administration sought to impeach the sitting Chief Justice. This was clearly political overreach. When Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial rule in 1972, he did not dare cross the great divide between a willful presidency and an independent judiciary. In the case of Chief Justice Renato Corona, the administration managed to get 188 congressmen to sign a flimsy complaint they did not even read. The Senate, for hundreds of millions of reasons, convicted Corona on the otherwise remediable misdemeanor of an incomplete SALN.

The overreach eventually backfired. We now have a mountain of evidence, circumstantial but convincingly voluminous, that the impeachment was bought and the conviction was bribed.

The move against Corona undermined the independence of the judiciary. Every appointment to the High Court thereafter is tinged with partisan color. Notice how those agitated by what appears to be wanton disregard for constitutional procedure are not at all expectant of heroic constitutionalism on the part of the Court. Compare that with the way people immediately rallied behind retired Chief Justice Reynato Puno’s call for a popular initiative to define the pork barrel as unconstitutional.

The judiciary’s ability to recover eroded prestige is today compromised by talk of “Napoles-style” fixers. When the Court Administrator called for an investigation into the matter, the DOJ immediately undermined that by initiating its own investigation.

The message here is that the judiciary cannot be trusted to investigate itself. The sick doctor cannot be expected to heal himself.

The Congress that was bribed to decapitate the head of a co-equal branch of government was itself embroiled in the scandal over pork. The money trails of questionable releases timed for the episode of impeachment could not be kept out of public view for very long.

No sensible citizen today holds the Congress as a truly independent branch of government. How can an institution severely addicted to pork solve the crisis of public confidence about the efficacy of checks and balances? Will money-hungry legislators go after a presidency that seems to have run amuck with the budget?

The President told us last August that the congressional pork is abolished. The Solicitor-General told the Court last week the pork barrel is alive, albeit “suspended.” It is tucked away somewhere for use at a more auspicious time. We are being lied to.

Who will investigate this, even facetiously “in aid of legislation?” The Senate through the venue of a public hearing? All of them received hundreds of millions via the “Disbursement Acceleration Program” (DAP), this poisoned tree whose bitter fruit the executive branch will soon have to eat.

A few days ago, whistleblower Sandra Cam blew the whistle on Senate President Drilon. The politician, she claims, dealt with Janet Napoles since 2005. That partnership was at least politically profitable, with Napoles said to have contributed much to the LP electoral kitty. Drilon, says Cam, was responsible for striking Napoles’ name from the list of those summoned for hearings on the fertilizer scam. Now we know her fake NGOs cornered most of the deals.

Who, in the legislature, has clean enough hands to credibly conduct an inquiry into this growing mess that is rapidly washing away government’s legitimacy? I can think of no name.

And what of the Presidency? Will it survive this deluge of public disgust?

Having intimidated the judiciary by a shocking impeachment and having undermined the independence of the legislature by greasing it with pork, will the presidency be the last institution standing?

Certainly, those who think the President has the greasiest hands will not think so. The controversial DAP is now this presidency’s Achilles’ heel. If the large-scale fabrication of “savings” and untrammeled disbursement of the same is declared illegal or even unconstitutional, the President, even if immune from suit, will begin to be tried in the public eye. After his term, he will land in jail for massive malversation or plunder.

Can he now buy a mantle of constitutionality for what he has done? With what?