Analyst: Senate should finish trial
MANILA, Philippines — The outcome of Chief Justice Renato Corona’s impeachment trial can be a “slippery slope” that the country “may never recover from.”
But the Senate must ensure completion of the process so that lessons may be learned and mistakes could be corrected, said a political analyst.
In a church forum in Manila yesterday, Prof. Prospero De Vera III, vice president for public affairs of the University of the Philippines, said that should Corona be exonerated, he would be rendered a “lame duck.”
On the other hand, his conviction may also pave the same fate for other justices who had been appointed by former President Macapagal-Arroyo, said De Vera.
“One problem of the impeachment is that if Corona is acquitted, he is a lame duck chief justice because he will never be left alone by his critics,” he said.
“If convicted, he will be removed from his post but… it now opens the possibility for those who dislike [him] to go after other justices who are perceived to be of the same mold,” he said.
“It’s a slippery slope that we may never recover from … this is a [touchy] arena of impeachment that we entered into,” he pointed out during the weekly forum hosted by the Catholic Media Network in Intramuros, Manila.
He said it was “fundamentally easier” to impeach a president, whose scope of power was very broad, than a Supreme Court justice, a member of a collegial body.
De Vera said the Senate, sitting as an impeachment court, must ensure it would not resort to “quick fixes” that would deprive again the country’s democratic process of important lessons. Inquirer
