DAP ruling and the SALN of justices not related

In the early morning of the day when Germany copped the championship trophy of the World Football Cup, local news media and international television channels were all busy reporting about the sporting event. The hundreds of millions of worldwide spectators saw the great kick made by Mario Goetze, a half time replacement of the aging Miroslav Klose, to score the winning German goal. And I thought there would be no other news that would dominate the day.

Before the morning news from all media outlets got reported, however, there came the advisory that His Excellency, President Benigno Simeon C. Aquino III, would talk to the country in a nationwide "face-the-nation" type of an address on the Supreme Court ruling of the Disbursement Acceleration Program. When social media started copious speculations on what would the president say, I thought that the said advisory seemed somehow to steal the thunder of the German victory hours earlier.

 Yet, when I opened a national paper, I read what to me, was an entirely different kind of news. It did not have the magic of the Germany-Argentina title game, nor did it carry the impact of a presidential declaration. While a front page news, it was not even the headline of the paper. It was the story about the Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth of the justices of the Supreme Court of the Philippines.

I must have ingested a lot of Robert Ludlum and Frederick Forsythe thrillers in the past that I read the news with an anticipation of a twist. It was not the report that our justices are multi-millionaires that caught my attention. Early in my life, I have been brainwashed into believing that material gifts come more easily to the learned than they do to the less educated. I would be more surprised, if not derisively suspicious, to know of a member of our highest tribunal to be poor.

More than the knowledge of the wealth enjoyed by our justices, the peripheral viewpoint from the reporting was more exciting. Yes, they deserve their fat salaries. There is no doubt that the high moral ground they live has to be fiercely defended from those with impure intentions and one such defense is to insulate them from material temptations.

There were meticulous details of their other sources of income. Their high pay was (is) a given but many of us thought that would suffice. We did not expect that in addition to their usual salaries, our justices were (are) favored with millions of pesos from not-so-obvious fund sources as say, the Presidential Electoral Tribunal. Well, of course, it appeared that what was reported were factual details and the reporting was objectively done.

There were no Robert Ludlums nor Frederick Forsythes until the president of the republic, addressed the nation. That was how I perceived the news of the justices SAL-N report. We, the people had to be informed the kind of emoluments they receive from government. We should be appraised that beyond their regular salaries, the members of our Supreme Court get millions of pesos more. If it was aimed to let us know the privileges of our jurists for whatever reason there could be, the timing was perfect.

The entitlement of our justices to other sources of income is legal. That much can be deduced from the news. Eerily, that report coincided with the president's facing his people. Was it not that in the president's speech to the citizenry, he said that the DAP is legal without having to say that the other monetary privileges of the justices are likewise legal? Did not the president provide our justices with a totally unrelated subject matter of their emoluments to think of as he suggested that the ruling by the Supreme Court of its unconstitutionality is not well founded and should be reconsidered?

If that was the remote peripheral objective of the SAL-N news, and something tells me it was, it was wrong. That news should not have been reported that day. It would have been better had the president simply reprised the "I am sorry" of his predecessor rather than remind the justices, in a run-about way, of some material advantage. I am sure that should the president commit a further lapse of filing a motion for reconsideration on the DAP ruling, the issue of the justices other forms of emoluments, no matter how ingeniously and deviously, be it pursued, would not, at all, matter.