Stop Comelec ruling, 2 lawmakers urge SC chief
TWO LAWMAKERS on Thursday said Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno should issue a temporary restraining order (TRO) against the Commission on Elections (Comelec) ruling to disqualify Sen. Grace Poe from next year’s presidential race to ensure that her name would be on the official ballot.
1-BAP Rep. Silvestre Bello III said Sereno should also issue a status quo ante order to prevent a constitutional crisis.
Bello, a former justice secretary, said that since Poe’s disqualification case had yet to be decided by the Supreme Court, it would be unfair for her and her supporters if her name would be unduly stricken off the ballot.
Bayan Muna Rep. Neri Colmenares, who is running as senator on Poe’s ticket, said a failure by the Supreme Court to give Poe at least a TRO would violate her right to run for office based on a faulty decision of the Comelec.
“The Comelec’s reasoning will cause havoc in the bar exams and confuse examinees because it invents a new form of discrimination against the accused in favor of the accuser,” Colmenares said in a text message to the Inquirer.
He said he was optimistic that the Supreme Court would side with Poe because “Philippine jurisprudence states that the complainant has the burden of proof and therefore she’s presumed a natural-born Filipino until complainants prove she’s not.”
Public clamor
On Wednesday, Deputy Speaker Giorgidi Aggabao, president of the Nationalist People’s Coalition, said he was confident the Supreme Court would rule in favor of Poe because the justices could not ignore the public clamor for her to run for President.
In a text message to the Inquirer, Aggabao said: “I think the [Supreme Court] will roll back the Comelec decision. While the legal details of the cases would matter, the [Supreme Court] cannot ignore that Grace is intensely popular [and she] has been consistently polling quite well.”
He noted that Poe consistently ranked high in the polls among the presidential candidates despite the controversy about her citizenship and Philippine residency.
Let people decide
Poe was tied with Vice President Jejomar Binay with 26 percent each as the top choice for President in the latest Social Weather Stations poll, taken between Dec. 12 and 14. She was third, with 21-percent voter support, in a Pulse Asia survey conducted from Dec. 4 to 11. And she was first in a poll taken by pollster June Laylo from Dec. 4 to 12.
“I think the best decision the [Supreme Court could] make is to leave the issue to the people, who need to be trusted to govern themselves. That the candidates are tied means the electability of anyone in the pack is doubtful. For Grace, I think that should be significant,” Aggabao said.
He said the Supreme Court would be the final battleground for Poe. “Once her legal hurdles are resolved, she should skyrocket in the polls again,” Aggabao said.
But the Liberal Party chief for political affairs, Rep. Edgar Erice, said he did not expect Poe to get a reprieve from the Supreme Court.
The Caloocan lawmaker said the decision of three Supreme Court justices on the Senate Electoral Tribunal (SET)—Associate Justices Antonio Carpio, Arturo Brion and Teresita Leonardo-de Castro—to vote against Poe on the case to oust her from Senate was indicative of how their peers on the highest court would vote in the disqualification case against her.
Poe narrowly won the SET vote, 5-4, with Sen. Nancy Binay, daughter of the Vice President, voting with the three justices to oust her from the Senate because she was not a natural-born Filipino.
“When the three justices of the Supreme Court voted against Poe on the SET, I already knew then that she had a serious problem. At a legal standpoint, she is not a natural-born Filipino,” Erice said.
