STANDARD EDITORIAL: THE CHOSEN ONE
MANILA, AUGUST 27, 2012
(MANILA STANDARD) By Manila Standard Today - There was a
whiff of dishonesty when President Benigno Aquino III said he was dissatisfied
with the choices he received for chief justice earlier this month.
At the time, Mr. Aquino took the Judicial and Bar Council to task for
disqualifying his Justice secretary, presumably his favored candidate, because
there were pending disbarment cases filed against her.
While the move was clearly in keeping with the council's rules, Mr. Aquino
characterized that as being unfair because, he said, other similarly situated
nominees were still considered.
In doing so, the President might have overlooked the council's explanation
that the cases against the other candidates had either been dismissed already or
in a stage where no prima facie evidence had yet been established.
Mr. Aquino then sullenly conceded that he had no choice but to appoint a
chief justice from the list that had been given him because that was what the
Constitution required.
The almost truculent tone was in sharp contrast to the glowing commendations
that the Palace showered on Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno when it announced
her appointment on Friday.
The President, the Palace said, was confident that the new chief justice
would be able to reform the Judiciary and, given her relative youth, would have
more than enough time¯up to 18 years in office-to see those reforms take root.
Was the President truly dissatisfied with the list of nominees and was his
final choice simply making the best of a bad situation?
Or was he merely putting on a show to hide the deep satisfaction he derived
from being able to replace an uncooperative chief justice with someone who was
less troublesome?
The answer lies in a Palace statement made as early as December 2011, even
before the Corona impeachment trial had begun.
Shortly after engineering Corona's impeachment in the House of
Representatives, the President ordered his legal staff to shop around for
replacements.
At the time, a spokesman said the next chief justice that President Aquino
wanted "should be like Associate Justice Sereno," who had issued a dissenting
opinion on the court's decision to allow his political enemy, former President
and now Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, to seek medical treatment abroad.
Notwithstanding his complaints about the unfairness of the selection process,
it is apparent that the President got the chief justice he wanted all along.
The new chief justice, after all, was Mr. Aquino's own first appointment to
the high court and she, in turn, had voted several times in his favor.
The most telling of those instances was her dissenting opinion on how much
the President's family should be compensated for a sugar plantation that should
have been turned over to farmers decades ago under the agrarian reform program.
Mr. Aquino might portray the new chief justice as someone who was in tune
with his reform agenda, but there are others who might see her track record to
date as a sign of malleability and a lack of independence.
Let us hope she proves them all wrong.
Chief News Editor: Sol Jose Vanzi
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