Malacañang urges Corona to go on leave

Secretary Edwin Lacierda

Malacañang on Wednesday called on Chief Justice Renato Corona to go on leave now that the Senate has convened itself as an impeachment court to try his case.

“I think it would be proper for him to take a leave considering that he is the one undergoing trial and he is trying to involve the entire judiciary in the impeachment case,” President Benigno Aquino III’s spokesperson, Edwin Lacierda, said some 10 minutes after Corona delivered a scathing speech at the Supreme Court compound.

Lacierda said the President was unable to listen to Corona’s speech because he was engaged in an interview with Time magazine at that time.

Speaking at a news briefing, Lacierda said Corona’s speech was “designed to identify President Aquino with a dictatorship” although the Chief Justice had no right to accuse Mr. Aquino thus because members of his family were “victims” of the martial law regime of the late Ferdinand Marcos.

Lacierda said he was talking at this instance not as Mr. Aquino’s spokesperson but as a constitutional law professor who had read the opinions of the late revered Chief Justice Claudio Teehankee on dictatorship.

“And I can tell you, Chief Justice Corona, you are no Claudio Teehankee,” he said, adding that everything Corona had said in his tirade against Mr. Aquino was “lies.”

Benefit of the doubt

Lacierda said the President gave Corona the benefit of the doubt when the latter told the people early on the Aquino administration to “watch” him prove that he would be fair to the government.

“And we watched and waited and waited, and waited. Nothing came of it,” he said, claiming that Corona’s decisions were “all partial to the apparatus” of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

“And by the way, the speech of Chief Justice Corona [supposedly answering the allegations] point by point by point by point—it’s just like listening to the interview of Arnold Clavio with … Arroyo. They were saying the same thing,” he said in reference to GMA 7’s interview with the former President before she was moved to Veterans Memorial Medical Center in Quezon City.

On Corona’s charge that Mr. Aquino wanted a friendlier Supreme Court, Lacierda said what the Palace wanted was an independent tribunal that could “dispense true justice.”

He said  his message to the people was: “Let us not believe in lies.”

Gun to their heads

At a press conference, House Minority Leader Edcel Lagman said that with Corona’s impeachment, the Aquino administration had practically placed a gun to the heads of other justices of the high court.

Lagman said the administration’s decision to impeach only Corona was part of its strategy to cover its real intentions by showing that the move was not an attack on the institution but on a single person.

Lagman cited the claim of Iloilo Representative Niel Tupas Jr., the House justice committee chairman, that two other Arroyo-appointed justices were next to be impeached by the House.  With a report from Gil C. Cabacungan Jr.