Crown of Thorns

Corona of Thorns

I find today's editorial of the Philippine Daily Inquirer cogent and incisive:

LET US BE CLEAR: IF THERE IS A POLITICAL storm gathering over the designation of Renato Corona as the new chief justice, it is not the fault, or even the doing, of presumptive president-elect Benigno Aquino III. If you slap a man in the face, he might strike back or turn the other cheek, but in either case, he is merely reacting to the provocation.

Now that President Macapagal-Arroyo has provoked the crisis-in-the-making, what should Aquino do?

He should follow the law. He should be careful not to fall into the many legal traps laid cunningly by the departing administration. He should be bold, but if faced with a choice err on the side of circumspection.

But none of this means he cannot show his displeasure, or the public’s, at the Arroyo administration’s brazen manipulation of the levers of power, at the way the choice of new chief justice has been rammed down the people’s throat.

Thus, Aquino may want to make good on his promise, and take his oath of office before the captain of his barangay in Tarlac. The latest victims of President Arroyo’s alternative Midas touch—everyone she appoints as spokesman eventually shrinks before our eyes, his or her reputation greatly diminished—cannot be listened to when they suddenly preach about republican courtesies. The Arroyo administration, especially in its last five years in power, ran roughshod over these very niceties, such as due deference between co-equal branches of government. (Where was the administration Charito Planas now tries to defend when the Senate fought for the right to limit the scope of executive privilege?)

While it is true that tradition dictates the presence and the participation of the chief justice at a new president’s oath-taking, this tradition is not a matter of law; a new president is not legally bound to take his or her oath before the head of the judiciary. And there is a glorious precedent: Aquino’s own mother took her oath of office in 1986 before a person other than the chief justice at the time. Cory Aquino’s choice of Associate Justice Claudio Teehankee was deliberate; it reflected public disappointment over a Supreme Court co-opted by the Marcos regime, and recognized the courage of Teehankee’s often solitary dissents.

We do not suggest that Senator Aquino choose an associate justice to administer his oath; that would further politicize an already politicized Court. But he should choose someone other than Corona, to express his conviction, a conviction we share, that while the appointment of the new chief justice can be argued as legal, it is deeply unethical, and serves only President Arroyo’s narrow self-interest.

There are other ways to express this conviction: Aquino can refrain from acknowledging Corona during his first State of the Nation Address, on July 26. Of course, the defenders of the Arroyo administration will immediately jump on this as a petty act—when in fact it is the Arroyo administration which has shown the most breathtaking pettiness. No, a deliberate snub during the Sona, like the choice of a barangay captain to administer the presidential oath, is a principled political statement.

Planas’ vapid advice about statesmanship and standing “10 feet taller,” on the other hand, is an example of a political statement without principle. It grates not only because it uses an argument the Arroyo administration was quite happy to ignore at the peak of its power—who needs statesmanship when you can rely on the so-called presumption of regularity?—but also because it is simply ignorant. A lawyer herself, Planas should have known from the American jurisprudence that shapes Philippine law practice that outright hostility had sometimes marked the relationship between president and chief justice—and yet democracy’s purposes continued to be served.

We suspect Planas and others like her know that there is, in fact, a Philippine difference, and it lies in the weakness of our political institutions. Unfortunately for them, they cannot say, at least not out loud, what greatly weakened those same institutions in the last decade. But we can: It was an administration which, among other failures, made unjustifiable or unethical appointments, and coerced or coaxed the appointees into accepting them.

"Judicial quarantine"

I could not have said it better:

Judicial quarantine

 

WHILE IT WILL REQUIRE A CONGRESSIONAL resolution for the country to start referring to Sen. Benigno Aquino III as the president-elect, the country as a whole has accepted that he has been conferred the most remarkable mandate since the present Constitution’s ratification in 1987. The conferment of this mandate was such a long-anticipated event that when it became clear the people had spoken, it sparked an epidemic of statesmanship among many (though not all) of Aquino’s major opponents in the presidential race.

Instead of allowing the country to savor the end of the long crisis of legitimacy that began—and deepened— from 2001-2005, the present administration chose to pursue its strategy of manufacturing crises so as to maximize its opportunities for aggrandizing power. The latest manifestation of this pathological approach to political power is President Macapagal-Arroyo’s maneuvering to appoint the next chief justice.

We should never forget that “disempowering” the president from making appointments on the eve of elections, and from election day until he or she turns over the reins of government to a duly-elected successor, is a sensible democratic principle. We should never forget that it is a principle that has been supported for close to two generations—both by jurisprudence and by the intent of the framers of the present Constitution. It is a principle of democratic self-control and executive responsibility—a legacy of the President’s own father, and respected on the whole by every successor of Diosdado Macapagal until his own daughter reached the terminal stage of her own presidency. And we should never forget that the only reason this wholesome and responsible principle has been abandoned is that President Arroyo had wanted it changed and found obliging accomplices.

Thus, during the campaign, when Senator Aquino drew a line in the sand, saying he would not recognize any chief justice appointed by Ms Arroyo, the Palace seized on it to accuse him of recklessness and contempt for the law. A smokescreen to disguise its own relentless assault on well-established ethical and legal principles. In a similar vein, media and the political class knew the administration was viewing the anticipated results of the 2010 elections with dread. Informed circles weren’t surprised when it made a last-minute gambit to postpone the elections; and in the context of this scheme of the administration, Aquino’s warning that the public wouldn’t tolerate postponing the elections was both timely and necessary. As Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales, initially (and naively) critical of the warning, belatedly realized.

Recklessness and irresponsibility, therefore, are characteristics of the administration and its Constitution-related experiments. Aquino has properly refused to concede logic or legitimacy to the administration’s efforts. He has properly called attention to the reality that the President’s experimentation would have failed if she hadn’t found willing accomplices, including Associate Justice Renato Corona who shows every sign of being eager to grab the poisoned chalice of a controversial chief magistracy offered by the President.

It is a chalice a former chief justice, Manuel Moran, viewed as simply unethical to accept as far back as 1953. It is a cup that—Corona must be made to recognize—will contain, if not legal, then certainly, ethical hemlock as far as his standing before the next president and the country is concerned. When Aquino said he would prefer to take his oath of office before a humble barangay official, he was anticipating the contents of the oath to be administered on June 30: to uphold both the spirit and letter of the Constitution and to do justice to every man.

Corona must be quarantined until our institutions resolve his legitimacy. What Ms Arroyo and Justice Corona are expecting the country to do is to surrender to tradition when it is tradition—and the law—that they have both flouted. Aquino need not dignify this travesty by extending any kind of official courtesy.

(Phil. Daily Inquirer Editorial, May 15, 2010)

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The Presidentiables, ‘Puso sa Puso’

Note: Puso sa Puso was an evangelical night of prayer with presidential "forum" where the presidentiables were interviewed heart-to-heart one after another last April 26, 2010 at the Big Dome in Cubao, Quezon City, Philippines. VOTENET, a network of various Christian non-partisan organizations involved in voter's education (which included ISACC, Christ's Commission Fellowship and One Vote Movement, among many others) served as the secretariat of the event.

One Vote, which asked for Volunteer Poll Watchers among the Christians who attended, was eventually accredited by the Comelec as a citizen's arm (similar to PPCRV) on April 27, 2010.

The Presidentiables, ‘Puso sa Puso’

By Melba Padilla Maggay, Ph.D.

Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture ( ISACC )

It was a unique Presidential Forum, that evening on Monday at the Araneta Coliseum: the emphasis was ‘up close and personal,’ none of the tired issues and abstract talk of platform, but simply glimpses of the presidential candidates as people.

Billed as ‘Puso sa Puso,’ the event was mounted by a large coalition of  churches and faith-based organizations identifying themselves as ‘evangelical.’ The strictures from the organizers were generally obeyed: no banners, no wearing of candidates’ colors, no hakot crowd. The 16,000 people who thronged the rafters of the Coliseum, the biggest crowd ever in this campaign season, paid to get there to take a close look at the candidates and pray together for the future of the nation.

The candidates were given 20 minutes each to answer questions that on the surface seemed merely personal but proved to be revealing, — like what were their most formative influences, their most painful, trying or perplexing times, their sources of guidance when faced with uncertainty, what they consider to be the country’s most important problems that need solving and what they propose to do about them, and what they wish to be remembered for at the end of their days. The questions were disarmingly innocuous, and the answers were, on the whole, refreshingly unscripted, though some echo themes that keep getting reprised.

Seven out of the nine presidentiables showed up – the two major contenders, Benigno ‘Noynoy’ Aquino and Manuel ‘Manny’ Villar, as well as the five at the tail end of the polls – Richard ‘Dick’ Gordon, Eddie Villanueva, Ma. Ana Consuelo ‘Jamby’ Madrigal, Nicanor Jesus ‘Nicky’ Perlas, and John Carlos ‘JC’ de los Reyes. The other two candidates, Gilberto ‘Gibo’ Teodoro Jr. and Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada, were on out-of-town sorties.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the latter five had more texture, richer shadings in their self-portraits, while the two leading ones stuck to the themes that have defined their candidacy.

Dick Gordon was unusually subdued and reflective; he seems to have grown from the man known to have a ‘motor mouth’ to a much quieter man who has learned much from 25 years of executive experience. The audience seems to have recognized this and gave him the evening’s warmest applause. Jamby, in contrast to the impression that she is, at bottom, only a loose cannon with the patina of old wealth, was at her gender’s best: transparently forthright and emotionally powerful. Nicky Perlas, for once, seems able to warmly connect to an earthbound audience, and not to a free-floating global community high up in a stratosphere of climatic and ethereal concerns. JC was unaccountably appealing, an authentic ingenue whose missionary zeal was heartwarming. Brother Eddie was a little less preachy, his scripted lines less dreary, although still weighted with the ideological furniture of his activist days.

The two leading contenders registered some changes in their public persona, but pretty much remained within their campaign spiels. Noynoy looked unusually dapper in a black suit with a yellow tie, Manny was casually cool in a white shirt, both in keeping with the prescribed colors for the event. One was dressing up, looking more presidential, the other was dressing down, perhaps to better identify with the people he has sought to represent. Noynoy now seems to be less wooden, emerging from the crucible of the campaign with a bit more self-assurance, but still talked too fast and at times stumbled on his words. Manny displayed glimpses of the old likable fellow that he was, but his remarks were laced at times with an irascible tone of bitterness, and there seemed a certain disconnect, a kind of dissociation between the outer and inner man that made him look opaque.

Both men’s personal narratives they subsumed within the larger myth-making of their campaigns. Noynoy sourced his most formative influences round the experience of martial law: as a boy of 12 he witnessed the incarceration and eventual assassination of his father, the turbulence that led to the fall of the Marcos regime, his mother’s rise to the presidency and the upheavals that ensued. Manny was early formed, he said, by the world of the palengke, and later by his student days at UP. Beyond this, there was not much that was previously unknown in these men’s stories.

Likewise, both men reprised their usual campaign themes. How to solve corruption occupied much of Noynoy’s question time. Echoing Roosevelt, he promised to wield a stick against grafters and a carrot for those who truly serve in government. In his allotted time, Manny reiterated that putting an end to the complex forces of poverty is possible. “Naawa ako sa ating bayan. Hanggang ngayon nag-uusap pa tayo kung kayang tapusin ang kahirapan. On the contrary sabi ko. Tayo na lang ang naiiwan sa Asia. Ang Japan, China, Korea, lahat halos either tapos na or matatapos na or malayo na ang marating.  malapit ng matapos. Pero tayo nagtatalo pa kung kaya bang tapusin ang kahirapan. Hindi pwede na tayo na lang ang naiiwan.”

Defining his issues, he took digs at his opponent: ‘May nagawa ka na ba?’ ought to be asked, he said. It is not enough to be clean in oneself, “dapat kaya rin kontrolin ang nakapaligid sa kanya.” We need a leader, he said, with the ability to make things grow, “yung nakapag-ahon sa kahirapan.”  From day one, he said, we need someone who hits the ground running; the problems of the country are such that “we can not afford a probationary period.”

It is interesting, however, that it was not Villar who was voted upon as the one who has the most ‘kakayahang mamuno.’ An electronic response system was set up among a random sampling of the audience. The 300 selected were asked, after each interview with a presidentiable, which from a list of traits were most characteristic of the candidate. It was Gordon who was singled out by the overwhelming majority as the one fittest to lead (82%). Strangely enough, majority of the participants (51%) relegated Villar to the category of ‘iba pa,’ which means people had ideas about him that were other than those listed, like ‘tapat, may integridad,’ or ‘may paninindigan’ . Noynoy predictably registered as ‘may integridad’ (45%).

The candidates’ responses to their most formative influences centered round the kind of socialization they got from their parents. Nicky’s parents taught him integrity, he said. JC learned fatherhood.  Jamby tells the story of how she was taken to task by her father in refusing to eat an uncooked egg which ruffled the feelings of the waiter who served it. This taught her to be considerate, a rare trait among the vastly careless upper classes to which she belongs.

In at least four candidates, the shaping forces in their lives were conflated with their most painful experiences. This was true with Noynoy, with Nicky whose  father served the government faithfully for 40 years and yet was charged with corruption, with Brother Eddie who remembers his family being turned out of their home by usurers and a land-grabbing syndicate, and Dick who left his job at Procter and Gamble and went to law school when his father was assassinated. The sense of continuing a ‘legacy’ was a strong motivational force among the candidates. Jamby, for instance, accounted her refusal to compromise to the memory of her grandfather, Jose Abad Santos.

Quite expectedly, all the candidates wore their religion in their sleeves,  conscious perhaps that this is one event where it is acceptable, even de riguer, to do so. All pray, and at least three account their running to ‘guidance from the Lord.’ Nicky, for instance, was particularly put out by the ‘Garci tapes’ scandal and prayed for clarity as to whether he should run and challenge the present political system.  “I don’t know how I got here,” JC said, with some perplexity.

It seems that “it is the Lord egging me.”  His campaign has meant the sacrifice of his business and precious time away from his family. Brother Eddie felt compelled by a call to political life, even if he already had influence as a church leader: “There in my home in Bulacan, officials already come to me. Why fight the Goliaths of this nation?”

JC described his running for president as a kind of ‘cross.’  He spoke of his candidacy as a ‘mission,’ an obedience to the need to introduce ‘prophetic politics.’ With great feeling, he spoke at length of Kapatiran’s advocacy against political dynasties that have privatized local governance, the patronage system that feeds on pork barrel funds, and the lawlessness that thrives on guns and moral decline. He envisions a politics where parties are disciplined by principles and the society behaves by “the standards set by the Lord.”

Similarly spiritual reasons undergird Nicky’s passion to change the system. He found particularly painful the abuses of martial law, and like many of his generation, he had to run for his life and for a while starved in the US as an emigre. These experiences formed in him a ‘spiritual core,’ he said. Alone of all the candidates, he decried the decline of Filipino spirituality, which used to rank high in surveys of world values, and named the increasing materialism and ‘decadence of Filipino culture’ as one of the top three problems, along with poverty and the environment.

Running as a sub-text to the proceedings was the theme of corruption and disgust with the present government, which surfaced now and then in the crowd’s reaction to remarks made on this by the candidates. Jamby found her six years in the Senate to be most trying, seeing how bills that were anti-poor got passed and billions of pesos put in the wrong hands. “Very painful for me was to vote for a 6 million relief package for Ondoy when I know that it will not got to the victims. But I said better to vote for it to see maybe a percentage go to the victims. I went all over the country and unfortunately the 6 billion that was voted by Congress didn’t reach the people.” Asked what she will do about corruption, she replied with her usual forthright audacity: “Let’s put the big fish in jail.” The crowd roared. “And the big fish na pinakawalan lang, put him back in jail.” Another round of applause.

A similarly enthusiastic outburst greeted Dick’s remark that “I will not pardon anybody.” Likewise, Nicky said, “The President has power to appoint 10,000 people;” he proposes to replace all the appointees of the Arroyo government within his first 100 days in office. Again, the audience erupted into a burst of gleeful applause.

In sum, two things struck me about this quasi-political, quasi-religious event:

One, we are witnessing once again the historic fusion of the religious and the political in our responses to the crisis of our time. As with Hermano Pule and the religious communities centered round Mount Banahaw, or as with our People Power revolution which was similarly suffused by the icons of our faith, our people, — both leader and led — derive their inspiration and source of resistance, not primarily from borrowed ideologies, but from a transcendent spiritual center inside them.

In a context where our institutions have been increasingly eroded and defrauded of integrity, it is perhaps the churches, those quiescent communities that are normally despised or relegated to the margins, that have the kind of grassroots constituencies that could stand up to abuses of power when sufficiently roused;

Two, it is a great encouragement that the personal narratives of the major players in this election share the sufferings of our recent history. This ‘fellowship of suffering’ makes for solidarity, an element that has always been lacking in most of our elite, the absence of which has barred us from becoming a genuinely national community. While some of these candidates may be said to be continuous with a long line of political and economic dynasties, the experience of victimization is a break from that tradition, and may lead to real sympathy for the plight of people.

Three, it is evident that among these candidates are some who, in another context and another time, may have been the right people to lead this country. But this election has been defined by two issues that dominate our current social landscape: corruption in our governance and massive poverty. It is an index of the depth of our people’s feeling for these issues that the two leading candidates are defined by their promise to provide a strong solution to these problems.

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Bible Verse for 2010 May 05

My son, if you accept my words and store up my commands within you, turning your ear to wisdom and applying your heart to understanding, and if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding, and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the LORD and find the knowledge of God. - Proverbs 2:1-5 - NIV

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