RESORTING TO MARTIAL LAW, coups d’etat, and similar measures would be beneath the level of the self-actualizing human person of evolved civilization who would prefer to uphold the force of logic instead of the logic of force. Even if this were civilian-backed, political power emanating from the advantage of one group or the other in having control of killing machines is not exactly an indicator of a much-evolved human civilization.

But naivete and hysterical self-righteousness can really cloud the otherwise lucid sensibilities of even our best-schooled intellectuals, especially if the military factor is not obvious in a political transition that negates a legitimate election.
The military factor can be hidden behind a thick cloak of legitimacy in overturning a landslide election result, especially if there is a conspicuous civilian backing for a military rebellion and the one installed in power is not a military personality.

This happened in 2001, with the chief-of-staff of the armed forces simply walking away from his sworn duty to be loyal to the Constitutionally-recognized commander-in-chief almost a full day before the Supreme Court chief justice swore in the vice president as the new commander-in-chief, thus creating a clear hiatus in civilian supremacy over the military, no less than a breaching of the life of the Republic with neither accountability nor even admission.

For this reason, historical accounts should be complete and accurate to answer definitively for the sake of affording cold objectivity for the opinion leaders of future generations, when they recall the twelve yes-no questions submitted to the Supreme Court – which the latter refused to answer – and when they try to provide historically-accurate answers for these, free as they will be from the emotions and recriminations and threats that tend to silence present-day thinkers.

It may turn out to be the task of future generations to collectively assert that, indeed, the outspokenly honest child was right after all, the emperor really had no clothes!

It has become a historical fact of public record that a lawyer named Alan Paguia submitted those simple yes-no questions to the High Tribunal under the leadership of Chief Justice Hilario Davide, who had earlier presided over the unconsummated impeachment trial of President Joseph Estrada and later personally swore-in Vice President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to the presidency.

As of this writing, neither the Supreme Court as a body, nor any of its member-justices, has presented answers to these questions. What they did was to penalize the lawyer with suspension from practising his profession for asking these questions in the first place. But latter-day compositions of the High Tribunal, or the Filipino people led by intellectually honest opinion leaders, may eventually give straightforward answers that may not at all be very pleasing to the incumbent justices and their beneficiary politicians, and may possibly tend to shame these persons’ respective descendants.

At the risk of venom or harm coming upon me, and with the intent only of serving the cause of accurate historical reckoning and of truthfully responsible – albeit delayed – public recognition, I dare enumerate Paguia’s questions here, for latter-day objective consideration by impartial scholars:

1. Is it true that the law strictly prohibits judges or justices from participating in partisan political activities?

2. Is it true that Your Honors participated in a partisan political activity during Vice President Arroyo’s oathtaking at Edsa on Jan. 20, 2001?

3. Is it true that Your Honors attended and authorized the Arroyo oathtaking in Your Honors’ official capacity as judicial officers?

4. Is it true that the basic law involved in this controversy is Article VII, Section 8 of the Constitution (Four grounds for succession of the Vice President to the Office of the President.)

5. Is it true that the sole constitutional ground invoked by the Vice President for her oathtaking as President was “permanent disability”?

6. Is it true that Your Honors authorized the oath-taking at Edsa on that same ground of “permanent disability”?

7. Is it true that Chief Justice Davide administered the oathtaking at Edsa on that same ground of “permanent disability”?

8. Is it true that Your Honors unquestioningly accepted the Vice President’s allegation of “permanent disability”?

9. Is it true that the “administrative matter” of administering the oath at Edsa by the Chief Justice involved the performance of an official duty, which ought to be consistent with the Constitution?

10. Is it true that there was never any proof of compliance with constitutional requirements regarding the said “permanent disability”?

11. Is it true that Your Honors later rejected the ground of “permanent disability” and replaced it with “resignation,” even as President Estrada never wrote any resignation letter?

12. Is it true that due process of law absolutely requires the “cold neutrality of an impartial judge” both in appearance and in substance, without which the proceedings are rendered void and without legal effect from the beginning?

My enumeration here of Alan Paguia’s questions can never be sanely construed as an act of “forum shopping” or an attempt to reopen for judicial review the legality of the Arroyo presidency. It is an appeal directed at the people themselves, now or at whatever time in the future, to seek the truth from facts and render a historical judgment for the enlightenment of our descendants.

The May 2004 elections will render any ardent wish for judicial reversal on this matter moot and academic. My appeal is for accuracy in its final historical accounting. Let the future generation redeem the intellectuals of the present one from the shame of compromising with truth for practical political considerations.

Why am I focusing on this matter at all, knowing that it will soon be moot and academic? Because it tends to give a very disturbing lesson to the Filipino voter on his odyssey: a landslide electoral victory can very easily be overturned by enough people allowing the rule of law to be flagrantly set aside, upon the partisan passions of the few millions of people, against the electoral verdict of tens of millions of voters.

Without the rule of law consistently upheld, all efforts to level the playing field during campaigns, all efforts to safeguard the ballot, all efforts to keep the count clean are very easily rendered utterly pointless.

Present-day efforts to “educate” the masses on the value of the right to suffrage and their duty to use it wisely are rendered inutile by the message of Edsa-Dos, the process whereby the intellectual elite arrogated upon itself the prerogative to “correct” the landslide vote of the “ignorant masses” in the 1998 presidential elections. And the impoverished Filipino, comprising the majority of the voters of this country, saw their landslide triumph being obliterated by the gods riding shining chariots, and are now saying, “inilagay namin sa pwesto, inalis ninyo!” (we put someone in the presidency, you removed him) and adding, “bakit pa kami boboto uli?” (why are we going to vote ever again?)

It was a milestone for the typical Filipino voter, who comes from the ranks of the masa, to celebrate the first-ever time they won, where the candidate was their choice and the affluent just eventually accepted to support. That was one of the historical highlights in the last part of the Sun*Star News Service post-mortem analysis of the 1998 elections. Edsa-II perfunctorily “corrected” that milestone in a crude mob-rule manner with a quiet coup d’etat led by the AFP chief of staff, but passed off as a legitimate exercise of people power.

Intellectually-honest lawyers and professors in law schools have been soul-searching and are having serious difficulties in answering these and similar questions from their confused students:

1. In responding to the needs of the immediate moment the Supreme Court considered it to be in the people’s interest to proclaim as legitimate succession the assumption of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to the presidency. But without going into the prudence of that judgment’s content, what would be the logical effects on the stability of the rule of law in this country? A sitting president was removed from office by an unconsummated impeachment trial, after it was pronounced guilty by mammoth crowds massed up in Metro Manila and other cities. But does the 1987 Philippine Constitution provide for such a process as a valid verdict from massed-up millions?

Did not the Supreme Court, perhaps inadvertently, allow a very consequential violation of a basic Constitutional right to “presumption of innocence until found guilty without reasonable doubt by a competent court”? Has people power been quietly legislated into the fundamental law to constitute a competent court? Wouldn’t that development institutionalize “lynch-mob” justice and officially end the rule of law?

2. How about the matter of admitting as evidence a newspaper clipping of a person’s diary (that of the former executive secretary) to conclude another person’s state of mind (that then President Estrada was seriously considering to resign and, that therefore, in effect already legally resigned)? Wouldn’t this be a dangerous precedent from jurisprudence in the Estrada case? Can inferior courts now conclude from newspaper clippings and unsworn diaries of third persons in trying their cases, following the High Tribunal’s pragmatic example?

3. How about suffrage? How can the constitutionally-guaranteed exercise of suffrage to produce an election winner be voided by the combined action of the military and uncounted civilians, including Catholic school students way below voting age, who wouldn’t even more honestly call their act a rebellion and instead insist that it was just a Constitutional succession? The Martial Law Constitution of 1973 was ratified by a mere show of hands at government-organized rallies. We rejected the claimed legitimacy of that supposed ratification because those who were at the rallies were not even proven to be voters and more so because the raised hands were not even counted and proved to represent even just a plurality of anything.

4. When can Filipino civilians unseat a president that they don’t like, without depending on the military?

5. And still about the military, how come the military top brass could simply turn their backs on an incumbent commander-in-chief who was to be replaced not earlier than the day after, without having to declare or admit a rebellion and without having to face the court martial for insubordination? Can the military brass completely and permanently deny having mounted a rebellion just because that rebellion won? What would be the lasting effects of that action and that impunity on the sense of discipline of the entire military establishment?

6. Most importantly, how well do the country’s intelligentsia, academe and media understand what is going on in the hearts and minds of the impoverished but largely-silent majority? To say that the followers of Estrada are all ignorant and illogical is to be ignorant and illogical, and to say they were all mercenaries is a seriously fantastic oversimplification. Does the supposed “brain” understand the rest of the body, let alone the bigger but silent part of that body?

     This set of questions was first aired in a talk by my beloved friend, esteemed colleague in the Academe, and Lambat-Liwanag chairperson Dr. Noemi Alindogan-Medina that challenged academicians, especially historians, to record accurately and address fully.
This time around, many the self-righteously unrepentant intellectuals of the elite are passing judgment on the majority of the voters as “still ignorant” and needing “voter education,” totally ignorant as these intellectuals are of the great disservice they had dealt the nation and its adherence to the rule of law by their arrogance and impatience about it all.

In time, the majority of the Filipino voters, whose 1998 vote they took the liberty to “correct” in 2001, would become politically mature enough to forgive them, for they knew not what they were doing. In the meantime these self-appointed guardians of morality in politics would do well to think twice or even thrice before they go on, with their usual air of unfounded certainty, pontificating on criteria of worthy candidates, etc., and condescending the organic wisdom of the masa.

They would be reminded that when they were chanting to brand a certain lady senator a “pok-pok” (prostitute) because she danced briefly in triumph in a tension-filled moment during the impeachment trial; or when they made an issue of another senator’s allegedly deviant gender preferences, or when they were broadcasting short-message texts of unverified accusations passed off as first-hand knowledge over their cellphones, they were not exactly proving any great measure of moral or intellectual superiority over their less-schooled compatriots.