GAME
MANILA, JANUARY 17, 2012
(STANDARD) By Winston A. Marbella - When the Senate
resumes its sessions after the holidays, the 23 senators will have an additional
job waiting for them. Aside from their regular duties as one half of the
legislature, or the law-making branch of government (the House of
Representatives being the other half), the senators will also sit as judges in
the impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona.
Before the holiday break, the senators took their oath as judges and donned
their red robes to signify how seriously they were taking their role as judges.
Many of them have also spoken in public on how they would prepare themselves to
be judges. The present composition of the Senate is almost 50-50 lawyers and
non-lawyers.
This configuration could be providential. When they act as lawmakers, the
senators (as well as the congressmen in the House of Representatives), exercise
a "political" power in the sense that they are elected representatives of the
people.
The term political has a special meaning in constitutional law, as I have
learned from the writings of the eminent constitutional expert Fr. Joaquin
Bernas, who co-wrote the present Constitution as a member of the Constitutional
Commission convened by President Cory Aquino using her revolutionary powers
early in her term.
Unfortunately, our experience with politicians who are demogogues has given
the term unsavory meanings. We now equate politics almost totally with the worst
connotations of the word, as opposed to the Kennedy concept of governance that
politics is a noble profession deserving of the best and the brightest that the
nation can offer.
Legal meaning
The term "political" as used to describe the impeachment process means
specifically that it is a power given by the people to Congress as a political
body composed of duly elected representatives of the people (See "Impeachment
Q&A," edited by Carmelo V. Sison and Florin T. Hilbay, University of the
Philippines Law Complex, 2000.)
According to the authors, "That the senators are made to take an oath to 'do
impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws' means that the
impeachment process is a political act arrived at through the observance of
legal proceedings."
The authors explained: "Therefore, the process of impeachment would
necessarily involve political considerations as the outcome is determined by
duly elected representatives of the people, but, because this is a trial, the
Senate must observe due process and respect the rights of the officer
impeached."
"In the Senate, the Rules of Court are made to apply in so far as they are
applicable, and the rules of evidence and procedures are liberally construed in
the impeachment proceedings."
It is, thus, clear that the term political as applied to the impeachment
process refers to an act of the political branch of government—in this case,
Congress —as duly elected representatives of the people.
The principles should be pretty easy for lawyers to grasp, although being
political animals, senators may be influenced by considerations other than
purely legal or constitutional in nature. For the senators who are not lawyers,
the concepts can be tricky. It is to their credit that before they recessed for
the holidays, many of them said they would bone up and/or seek the advice of
lawyers.
The Senate itself has probably the best congregation of constitutional
experts: Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, Senators Joker Arroyo and Mirian
Defensor-Santiago, to name only a few. Their erudition and mentoring will be
crucial to the quality of the impeachment trial, particularly to achieve the
lofty goal of "impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws."
Policy-making
In one of his writings, Fr. Bernas further examined the role of the
legislature as lawmaker. In adopting our tripartite system of government, our
founding fathers made sure that the sovereign power of the peoiple shall be
exercised among co-equal (not necessarily equally powerful) branches of
government: the Congress, which writes the law, the Executive, which implements
the law, and the Judiciary, which interprets the law in case of disputes.
This sharing of the sovereign power of the people by the three branches of
government is meant to ensure that no branch accumulates too much power as to be
able to run roughshod over the other branches. Thus, a complex system of
separation of powers and checks and balances was devised. In practicing this
system, we often look to the accumulated experience of the older democracies, in
our case, the United States, which imprinted us with its demovratic concepts in
the 1935 Philippine Constitution.
Fr. Bernas writes that when Congress passes legislation, it also makes a
statement of policy, Thus, we can assume that when the senators vote on the
impeachment of the Chief Justice, they will not only be making a decision based
on the cold logic of the law and evidence presented, as a judge is presumed to
do impartially and objectively with a minimum of outside influence coming from
media or the perceived popular will of the people as presumably expressed in
periodic popularity poll surveys.
'Other considerations'
It will be safe to assume that the senators, being political animals, will
also take other matters into consideration. This does not mean, of course, that
the senator-judges should vote according to partisan or party considerations, as
some of them seem to believe when the pedestrian expression "numbers game" is
used to describe the impeachment process.
That may have been the belief in the House when they voted to send the Chief
Justice to the Senate for trial. But the historical record of the Senate shows
that senators have a far greater capacity to rise above the level of partisan or
party considerations, and thus make an indelible policy statement for the Rule
of Law and the sacred constitutional principle of separation of powers and
checks and balances.
That is the oath they took under the Constitution. The author is chief executive of a think tank, Marbella
International Business Consultancy.
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