A Judas and a plagiarist in high offices?

I tried my level best to stay off the course of commenting on what has recently been going on in the Philippine Senate and the Supreme Court. From how our honorable senators have made a dirty, cruel, and shameful joke out of this sacred thing called impeachment and how the otherwise brilliant members of highest court had supposedly prescribed some rules of impeachment procedures which to me is the sole and exclusive constitutional function of the House of Representatives, I have unlearned what I had been teaching to my students in the College of Law for about four decades. Woe to me!

In a quirky accident, a high official of a state university asked for my opinion on the very thing I have tried to skirt away from. The query was totally unexpected. Was he testing my little knowledge of Constitutional Law? Or did he just want to hear from an ordinary citizen a perception on the disturbing political events. I could not answer instantaneously. My difficulty to formulate a reply to the university official was not in what to answer because I have a modest understanding of “political question doctrine” but in how to respond without making him feel uncomfortable. His question could be an honest point in line with academic freedom, a concept that was crystallized in the old 1975 case of Garcia v. Faculty Admission Committee. Truth was that I could not disregard the reality that he occupied a sensitive government position that would appreciate a somewhat slanted opinion.

Plato and Edmund Burke, whose thoughts I dwelt on here in my previous columns, came to my rescue. While separated by about 2,000 years, both spoke on practically the same subject matter that I could use. What did Plato say? “The price good men pay for their indifference to social affairs is for evil to rule over them.” And Edmund Burke? “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” No matter how we explain these popular quotes, we can deduce that it is important for good men to participate in socio-political dynamics to attain a higher level of good governance.

By force of circumstance, I need to pretend to be Burke’s good man as I join a probable minority of our countrymen in asking Senate President Francis Escudero to work for the interest of the Filipino people rather than for his own observably personal benefit. I have to make this plea despite reading many narratives saying that like Judas, he sold his soul by receiving ?30 million campaign funding.

Let me also pretend to be Plato’s good man not socially indifferent in asking the ponente who declared that the impeachment articles as unconstitutional to reconsider that ruling. Yes I make this plea to right a perceived wrong because I do not want to believe a Facebook post revealing the immoral mind of the jurist as a plagiarist.

When the exposed modern Judas and the alleged plagiarist listen to the call of many Burke- and Plato-influenced Filipinos, then I will decide to continue commenting on matters affecting our countrymen’s best interest instead of staying off this course.