Sour grape republic

Chief Justice Renato Corona, the controversial “midnight appointee” who was suspiciously planted at the head of the Supreme Court by former President Arroyo shortly before she left office amidst a rough sea of corruption scandals, looked like a bloated Ferdinand Marcos; his face was swollen up like a hot-air balloon and his eyes were slits. Does this mean he looked guilty? Perhaps, but isn’t everybody in this foul-ball game? It was a menacing image for many, especially after breaking his Christmas “peace time” silence by what presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda referred to as “rabble rousing” a mob of black-shirted supporters outside the Supreme Court and condemning the entire impeachment trial currently ongoing against him as a mean-spirited and diabolical plot to oust him from his esteemed position in the country’s highest court. 

As the trial began, there was an eerie and powerful sense, at least for me, that despite the hopeful cloak of a nobler and more professional impeachment proceeding, we’ve seen all this major-league bullshit before. No matter how many glasses of mineral water I drank or antibiotics I swallowed after lunch last Monday, nothing could have spared me from the nauseating pang of deja vu I felt as I braced to watch the opening day of the trial on TV. Cringing as I watched the Senator-judges file in their Hugh Hefner robes, Tito Sotto sporting a sinister-looking Carlito Brigante beard, I couldn’t help but say out loud, “Here we go again.” I felt like what I was watching on television was the awful debut of another chest-thumping but essentially impotent “democratic process” in this country . . . like the old, ugly, and snake-oil-greased wheel of Philippine politics had merely been turning, and behind the scenes and under the scaly surface was just another sickening transfer of evil power taking place. I’ve seen this bad movie so many times before it makes me want to vomit in an almost violent way. 

 There was certainly a positive sense that Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile was determined to convene a court that had learned all the painful and stupid lessons from the abortion of the Estrada impeachment trial last decade, and that he was going to herd this thing through swiftly and efficiently, using nothing but the Constitution as his North Star — but the urgent tone he firmly established at the onset might also be interpreted as a reinforcement of the cynical, but unfortunately realistic assumption that this is all part of just another rushed and massively misguided power-grab, the kind Enrile seems to be always at the center of, and we Filipinos as a people seem to have a nasty fetish for; a vicious and masochistic repetition of televised history where the reins of corruption are — perhaps not at first but almost always inevitably — passed on from one group of individuals to another. Ousting Corona will remove a very sharp thorn in PNoy’s side and enable him to nail the Arroyos sooner, which will ingratiate him to the taong bayan seeking justice and mandate him with more power to do what he wants… So the billion-peso question is: What does he want? Is it the same thing we want? The answer to that second question is presumably yes, but we won’t know for sure until we see what PNoy does with the outcome of this trial, and the rest of his term. He may set an example, but will he continue to set examples without allowing himself to become one somewhere down along that eventually crooked presidential path? I am sincerely pessimistic about this, but I have been proven wrong many times, and this is one of those times where I hope it happens again.  

 Whatever the motives behind this trial, it is trying to move fast and according to the law, which is what everybody wants in the first place, and the reason why there seems to be no serious opposition against it. Corona is probably right about his trial being a witch hunt hatched by President Aquino (the Hacienda Luisita sour grape), Secretary Mar Roxas (the vice-presidential sour grape), and Justice Tony Carpio (the Supreme Court sour grape), but he misses the very crucial point that it won’t mean a thing if not enough people agree with him. The fact is that if the public outcry against his impeachment does not get louder faster, he will end up exactly how PNoy intended him to end up — a powerless black-and-white cartoon in a cartoon graveyard of fallen Philippine leaders. In other words, President Aquino may have a selfish agenda behind this trial, but what does it matter if the taong bayan seem to be OK with it? As UP College of Law professor Victoria Avena explained on Tina Palma’s show after the first day, an impeachment exists outside the modern democratic tripartite system of three branches of government, wherein the Supreme Court has the final say on everything. “Outside the three,” she said, “there is only one body that is supreme — ang taong bayan.”