Shut up and move on

THE SUPREME COURT'S ruling on Monday that the impeachment charge filed against Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr. was unconstitutional helped defused an explosive situation that was about to tear the nation asunder.

What should have been a routine investigation of Judiciary Development Fund disbursements by the Supreme Court by the House committee on justice turned into a veritable witch hunt against Davide by an opposition bent on seeking revenge for Davide's role in swearing-in Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as president after the EDSA II protests in January 2001 and the near impeachment of then president Joseph Estrada on corruption charges.

I initially supported the opposition's charges against Davide, horrified by the seemingly wanton spending of public money on lavish furnishings, cars and Baguio bungalows. Initial figures that came out claimed that five million pesos had been spent on new curtains for the Supreme Court (and for the record, it was for 5.5 kilometers of curtains, not 55 kilometers as I wrongly reported), 31 million pesos on "luxury cars" (1.5 million pesos each for 19 cars and a few vans most of which were mid-level Toyota Camrys, hardly luxury sedans), 8 million pesos on furniture (each Supreme Court justice got a new chair worth 25,000 pesos each and not 120,000 pesos as initially reported), and finally 34 million pesos for the building of new Baguio bungalows, after previous ones had been destroyed in an earthquake.

Davide's initial silence on these accusations and his repeated insistence that he didn't have to testify before the House justice committee, after being asked to do so for a year, pushed many congressmen to sign the impeachment demand against Davide. Although most of the 80 signatories were from the opposition Nationalist People's Coalition, a few were from the ruling Lakas-NUCD and the LDP.

Finally, last week the Supreme Court posted a detailed document on its website called "The Truth About the JDF," which detailed how the JDF had been spent over the last three years. It also explained how much money was spent on cars, curtains, furniture and the Baguio buildings. It provided believable explanations for all these expenses. If only Davide had released this document much earlier, many of the accusations against the Supreme Court could have been avoided.

I think President Macapagal should have intervened in the House-Supreme Court spat months ago, but the resentments were allowed to fester, which each side believing that it had the right to either investigate the other body or ignore it. Pride on both sides made all involved dig in deeper, turning what should have been a routine accounting probe into a political battle royale.

In the end, I still believe that an impeachment is a political act, not a judicial one, and that only the House of Representatives can initiate one. Once the impeachment rap is sent to the Senate, then the Senate sits as the impeachment court. That impeachment court is higher than any other court of the land, including the Supreme Court. Read the Philippine Constitution. As one of my readers in the US, Jove Trinidad, pointed out: "The Constitution is clear that even a Chief Justice can be impeached; that at least 1/3 of the members of the House of Representatives may 'initiate' or 'file' the proceedings against him and that the Senate has the sole power to try and decide his impeachment. (See Article XI)"

But that is all moot now. On Monday, the House voted on the measure and only 77 of the 188 members present voted not to accept the Supreme Court ruling and go ahead and transmit the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate. That meets the 1/3 threshold needed to transmit the impeachment, but opposition congressmen should admit that they misread public opinion on this issue big-time and just move on. As Conrado de Quiros pointed out in his Philippine Daily Inquirer column this week, the real corruption is not to be found in the Supreme Court, but in the salas of those corrupt regional trial court judges who put their decisions up for bidding to the highest bidder. Sad but true.

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I RECEIVED a veritable torrent of mostly angry, some abusive, e-mail after my last column in which I defended the opposition's probe of Davide's handling of the JDF funds.

To put the record straight for everyone concerned, I'm not Filipino and I don't have any connection to any political party anywhere. And no, I didn't receive any pay-off from Danding Cojuangco!

I did read both the 2000 and 2001 Commission on Audit's reports of the Supreme Court, which I downloaded from the CoA's website. None broke down the spending on individual items like curtains, cars, furniture and Baguio homes.

And finally, just a short note to say that my column Manila Moods celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.

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