At the End of the Day

WITH THE CORONA counsels seeking the Supreme Court intervention to stop the Impeachment Trial on Chief Justice Renato Corona, and the Impeachment Court junking the Santiago motion for reconsideration (MR) against the issuance of subpoena on two banks to furnish the court records of Corona accounts, a showdown is offing between the Senate acting as an impeachment court and the Supreme Court known for its rulings "perceived as not impartial." There are two good things that will come out of this development. First, it will demand a show on how far the balance of power in the Constitutionally-mandated branches of "democratic republican government" work when such balance is assailed by no less than the Chief of the high court himself. With majority of associate justices known to be Corona allies as far as certain controversial rulings are concerned, there is a strong possibility that the majority of SC justices en banc will favor the petition to stop the impeachme

THERE WAS AN ATTEMPT to misinform the Filipinos, coming from the Supreme Court lately through its spokesperson Atty. Midas Marquez, its Acting Chief of the Public Information Office. Midas claimed that he had an affidavit signed ( reportedly under pressure ) from the person involved in the distribution of official case documents of Ombudsman Chief Merceditas Gutierrez in her petition to have the High Court stop the impeachment hearing against her at the House of Representatives by the Committee on Justice, docketed as G. R. No. 193450. One claim said that copies of the 65-page petition (248 pages, including the annexes) were distributed and placed on the conference table of teh en banc session conference room on 14 September 2010. In a press statement issued dated 9 March 2011, Associate Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno put the facts clearly and unequivocally: "My office received the Petition on September 14, 2010, at 2:15 p.m. No other copy was received by me or by my staff either

I BELIEVE IT IS high time that the Constitution-granted balance of power between the branches of government--executive, legislative and judiciary--be made to work as it was meant to be, and let the concerned justices in the present Supreme Court be made to answer for their sins, for their arrogance in the exercise of judicial power. Even the conscientious justices themselves voiced out against the arrogance of the majority ruling the Supreme Court these days. And maybe for the first time in its history, the Supreme Court has abrogated unto itself power that does not belong to it, and in the process interfering with the lawful rights of the legislative and executive branches in exercising their Constitutionally mandated jobs. And these sins of the Supreme Court must be stopped now otherwise the country will end up having a power-hungry High Court that cannot be checked by its co-equal branches in government; a High Court that lords over the executive and the legislative branches as it