UNSEATED Marinduque Rep. Regina Ongsiako-Reyes has joined critics of the Supreme Court’s controversial ruling that allowed Sen. Grace Poe to run for President.
In a statement, Reyes asked why the high tribunal allowed Poe, a foundling and former US citizen who reacquired Philippine citizenship, to seek the presidency after earlier disqualifying her, a natural-born candidate with previous dual citizenship and known parents, from a lower elective post.
“If Poe is allowed to run, should not I, with more reason, be allowed to run?” Reyes said, adding that she could not help comparing the circumstances in her disqualification case with those in Poe’s and pointing out the different rulings of the high court.
She lamented the court’s treatment of Poe, whose parents are unknown, as a natural-born citizen, with 10-year residency and eligible for the highest post in the land while declaring her (Reyes) ineligible for a seat in Congress when she is “a natural-born citizen, with a birth certificate, whose parents are Filipino citizens and are known public servants.”
Invoking Poe case
Reyes, who is running for a congressional seat, is the first candidate to come out and invoke the court’s March 8 decision in Poe’s case.
In January, the court ordered the House of Representatives to oust Reyes after upholding its June 2013 ruling stating that she failed to prove that she was a Filipino citizen and had complied with the one-year residency requirement when she filed her certificate of candidacy for the 2013 congressional election.
The runner-up in the race, Lord Allan Jay Velasco, was declared the duly elected lawmaker. Reyes and Velasco will face each other again in the elections on May 9.
Reyes said the two new disqualification cases that Velasco filed against her in the Commission on Elections (Comelec) should be dismissed because the Supreme Court had already ruled in the Poe case that the poll body had no jurisdiction to decide on the qualifications of a president, vice president, senators and congressmen.
Reyes quoted the court’s ruling in the Poe case that under Article VI, Section 7 and Article VII, Section 4 of the 1987 Constitution, candidates for President, Vice President, senator and congressman “first have to run before the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, Senate Electoral Tribunal and the House of Representatives Electoral Tribunal can pass upon their eligibility/qualifications.”
Natural-born
Comparing herself with Poe, Reyes said that she, too, executed an affidavit renouncing her foreign citizenship, not once but twice on Sept. 21, 2012, and on Sept. 21, 2015. She said these affidavits of renunciation restored her status as a natural-born Filipino citizen.
The court ruled that her Sept. 21, 2012, affidavit proved she became a Filipino only on that date even if she had been serving as provincial administrator of Marinduque since the previous year.
Reyes, daughter of Marinduque Gov. Carmencita Reyes, said that if the high court allowed a foundling with no known parents like Poe to run for President, it should allow a natural-born citizen like her whose parents are known Filipino citizens to seek public office.
She said she would raise these arguments in her petition asking the high court to revisit her case.
“The two petitions against me in the Comelec had been overtaken by the Poe decision and should be thrown out forthwith,” Reyes said.
Open floodgates
In his dissenting opinion on the Poe case, Justice Mariano del Castillo warned that the majority ruling would open the floodgates to election protests on candidates’ eligibility in relation to citizenship and residency as it reversed the jurisprudence set in earlier poll cases.
“I do not want to wake up someday and see my beloved country teeming with foreigners and aliens posing as natural-born Filipinos, while the real natives are thrown into oblivion or relegated to second or third class citizens who have become strangers in their own homeland,” the justice wrote.
The losers in the Poe cases—the Comelec and the four individuals who sought Poe’s disqualification—have pending motions for reconsideration in the high court.