At the End of the Day

IN THE ANCIENT magical arts, alchemy involved the use of myriad substances blended together in order to produce a special potion that witches and wizards use in their tradecraft. It is believed at times that using invisible ingredients can produce something out of nothing. That is, something visible out of things invisible. At least. Today, political journalism in the Philippines has a way of conjuring things from thin air. Sometimes to the shaking heads of readers who felt aghast at such violation of what is rational versus the propagandist slant in newsmaking. When senior Supreme Court associate justices had been bypassed in the appointment of Associate Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno as the new Chief Justice, attendance in the flag-raising ceremony every Monday seems to transform from a mundane routine in the High Court into an exercise "abundant" with political interpretations; a politico-alchemical conjuring, so to say. Should the absence of certain justices

THE THEORY OF Constitutional Checks and Balances in government grew from the classical theory of separation of powers in goverment--between the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary. This allows a branch of government to provide a check on the other branch when it falls into the decadence of corruption and abuse of power. In theory, the legislative and judicial branches can reign on a rouge executive; the executive and the judiciary on a rouge legislative, and; the executive and legislative branches on a rouge judiciary. In fact, however, the executive and legislative branches of today have a hard time checking a rouge judiciary. In the general rule of the majority, a judiciary with majority behaving like they are not accountable to their wrongdoings, who can put a check on an institution that supposed to have "absolute" power in the interpretation of the Philippine Constitution? Of course, the problem is not the Constitution. It is the interpretation that