Phl is in great shape
Dear reader, wherever you may be. If you think the Philippines is going up in flames following the Supreme Court decision to declare vacant the position of chief justice and thereby rendering Maria Lourdes Sereno effectively without a job, you are terribly mistaken. You have merely been maliciously misled by biased television outfits who gave you that impression.
To be sure, there were those genuinely horrified and disturbed by the decision to give due course to a Quo Warranto petition against Sereno instead of having her go through the process of impeachment. But there are as many reactions as there are people caught up in a particular experience. And yet, practically all of the Philippine channels that chose to give substantial time to the story only solicited reactions that were negative.
Hilbay, Robredo, Trillanes, Hontiveros, Drilon, Aquino, Leonen, Akbayan, Ocampo. If you have a fairly good grip of Philippine affairs, you will see that these are names utterly predisposed to take the opposite view of anything the administration does. Yet it was the owners of these names that the television outfits chose to exclusively solicit reactions from. Why, they even went out of their way to also get the expected views of the jailed Leila de Lima.
It is no wonder then that if you got the impression the Philippines was exploding in protest, it was because that was the picture the biased television channels wanted to depict. Why, one station even got an obscure economist to express his dire forebodings about, of all things, Philippine politics, completely forgetting that in its own repeated business newscasts, the biggest story had been about the stock market surging despite the Supreme Court decision.
And if you happen to be outside the Philippines, it would not be a surprise if you missed these developments. That is because none of the giant television networks carried the story, at least on the very day it happened. What were on CNN, BBC, etc. were stories about Trump and Kim meeting soon in Singapore, Mahathir back in power, Israel and Iran, the Iranian nuclear deal, a dam burst in Kenya, a new ebola outbreak. There was nothing about the Philippines and Sereno.
In other words, it is only those who are trying to make a big deal out of the Sereno issue who see an issue in the entire brouhaha. Those who elected to keep an open mind do not see a democracy that is under assault, or a judiciary that is hobbling after its own independence. Instead they see institutions that are supposed to work working perfectly, oblivious to the pressures of politics.
The single biggest thing about this Sereno flap is that those who are on her side have chosen to completely ignore the fact that she has not qualified for the position she occupied by failing to file a number of statements of assets, liabilities and net worth as required. Such failure just cannot be glossed over, hence the Quo Warranto petition which essentially demanded by what authority or right did she assume her position.
Sereno was, therefore, not removed as she correctly can be removed only by impeachment. What the law did was to nullify her appointment as in fact it was null from the very beginning. If Leonen thinks the decision was an abomination, her infirm continuation in office would have been an even bigger abomination. And those Law professors who gripe they will now have to revise their teachings will have to be told that the law is not static but dynamic. So they better shut up or quit.
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