Under fire from all sides

THE SUPREME Court, once considered infallible on matters of law, has come crashing down from its pedestal because of its controversial ruling on Sen. Grace Poe.

Many lawyers strongly disagree with the high court’s decision which has given Poe the go-signal to run for President on May 9.

One was even bold enough to chastise the court on Facebook, once considered unthinkable for a lawyer.

That’s how low the high tribunal has sunk in the eyes of lawyers and other professionals.

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An insider in the high court says one of the justices persuaded the others to vote in favor of Poe.

It’s very unethical for Supreme Court justices to persuade their peers to vote for or against a case of national significance.

If that is true, then the magistrates in the highest court of land don’t think independently.

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Aside from the ruling on Sen. Grace Poe, I can cite two other instances where the high court was disgraced.

One was the ruling upholding the declaration of martial law by Ferdinand Marcos in 1972.

The other was involved a quarrel—which was made public—between then Chief Justice Fred Ruiz Castro and Associate Justice Antonio Barredo over something I can no longer recall. I was a reporter then for the now defunct Times Journal covering the Supreme Court in 1976.

But then the Supreme Court was just being practical in upholding Marcos’ martial law regime since the dictator would have disobeyed the high court if it ruled otherwise, anyway.

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The late Supreme Court Justice Isagani Cruz, one of the intellectual giants to grace the high court, would have voted against Poe if he was in the high tribunal.

And he would have written an erudite discourse on why Poe should be disqualified.

In 1995, Cruz, already retired and a columnist of the Inquirer, wrote about a case similar to Poe’s.

Here’s that column item:

“Several years ago a permanent resident of the United States came back to the Philippines and was elected to a local office. A protest was lodged against him on the ground of lack of residence. The evidence submitted was a green card, and it was irrefutable.

“The Supreme Court ruled that his permanent and exclusive residence was in the United States and not in the municipality where he had run and won. His election was annulled.

“Where a former Filipino citizen repents his naturalization and decides to resume his old nationality, he must manifest a becoming contrition. He cannot simply abandon his adopted country and come back to this country as if he were bestowing a gift of himself upon the nation. It is not as easy as that. He is not a donor but a supplicant.”

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Grace Poe, who lived in the United States almost all her adult life until 2005, thinks she is doing this country a favor by renouncing her US citizenship, re-embracing Filipino citizenship and then running for the presidency.

A pre-school teacher in the US, she doesn’t have the experience in governance.

My sources at the Movie Television Classification Board (MTRCB), where she was chair before running for the Senate, claimed the chain-smoking Poe was reportedly always absent because of a hangover from drinking the previous night.