For the past week, the Philippines has been rocked by a near-constitutional crisis after around 80 congressmen signed an impeachment complaint against Supreme Court Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr. for alleged improper use of the 3-billion-peso Judiciary Development Fund.
The complaint against Davide was spearheaded by Camarines Sur Rep. Felix William Fuentebella and Tarlac Rep. Gilbert Teodoro after having waited for a whole year for Davide to respond to their repeated requests for justification of how the JDF had been spent. Fuentebella decided to investigate the expenditure of the JDF after Naga City court employees complained to him that they hadn’t been receiving their cost-of-living allowances as mandated by the JDF.
Now, the JDF is collected from the various court fees that are charged litigants in courts across the country. Eighty-percent of the JDF is supposed to be used to boost the income of the 25,000 court employees nationwide. The remaining 20 percent can be spent as the Supreme Court sees fit, including for the refurbishment of court premises and for construction of new buildings.
The suspicious expenditures by the Supreme Court that Fuentebella and Teodoro wanted Davide to explain to them included: 31 million pesos for luxury cars; 5 million pesos for curtains; 8 million pesos for furniture, and 34 million pesos for Baguio vacation homes.
As NPC Rep. Darlene Antonino-Custodio pointed out this week, at 5 million pesos, the curtains bought for the Supreme Court would be more at home in Buckingham Palace than in the Supreme Court of the Philippines. She estimated that at an average cost of 100 pesos per meter for good quality material in a shopping mall, the 5.57 million pesos spent on curtains could have bought 55,700 meters of cloth. A colleague of mine tried to defend the expense by saying that “the Supreme Court is in a large building.” But I said, “Come on, it’s not that big! That’s 56 kilometers of curtains!”
Other politicians were also aghast at the P120,000 price-tag for each chair purchased for each justice on the Supreme Court. As Rep. Agapito Aquino (LDP-Makati) pointed out, “We were taken aback by the price tag. Not even a king deserves that throne.”
Justice Davide repeatedly refused to appear before the House committee on justice, citing the fact that the Supreme Court was financially independent and that as a part of a co-equal branch of the government, namely the judiciary, it didn’t have to explain itself before Congress.
This arrogance and lack of cooperation on the part of Davide is what finally exasperated 80 congressmen, who felt compelled to file the impeachment complaint against Davide and have it transmitted to the Senate for action.
As usual, the alarmist supporters of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and EDSA-Dos came out screaming against the impending impeachment, vowing to hold street demonstrations to oppose what they characterized as an assault on democracy. Please, what nonsense! I really don’t see why anything critical of the Arroyo administration is automatically assumed to be a diabolical plan by the opposition to usurp power in the name of former President Joseph Estrada and/or Nationalist People’s Coalition founder and chairman emeritus Danding Cojuangco, Jr.
Davide sent a 15-page letter on Sept. 30 to House Speaker Jose de Venecia Jr., appealing to the House of Representatives to drop the impeachment complaint against him. He included a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo about how independent and co-equal the Supreme Court is, and how therefore the court has the right to do whatever it likes with its money based on the concept of the separation of powers. It is here that I have to disagree with Davide, who with his many years of judicial experience, should know better. The Supreme Court may be part of a co-equal branch of the government, the judiciary, but that does not mean it is above explaining itself to the elected representatives of the Filipino people. Congress has the legal right and duty to investigate malversation of public funds, even if done so by the Supreme Court.
In a country where nearly half of the population survives on around 100 pesos a day, I really think that 120,000-peso chairs and curtains worth 5.5 million pesos are indeed the business of Congress. It is a scandal and crime that so much money is being wasted on lavish furnishings for the justices, while millions of Filipinos don’t know where their next meal would coming from.
In the end, I really don’t think Davide should be impeached over this, but if calling him before an impeachment court constituted by the Senate is the only way to get some answers from him and to discipline him, then so be it. Davide is already playing with fire in defying the will of elected representatives. He would do well to remember that he has not been elected by the people, and is accountable to the elected representatives of the people.
President Arroyo should have advised Davide to comply with the House committee on justice’s request for an appearance before it. Instead, she’s been playing political games, as usual, and has been cynically trying to use the crisis to her own selfish advantage, while having allegedly connived secretly to produce the crisis by supporting the impeachment complaint against Davide.
Many readers wrote to me in anger last week, upset at my saying that veteran actor Fernando Poe Jr. would probably be elected if he runs for president next year. What they failed to notice is that I didn’t say I supported him. I’ve always expressed concern over actors going into politics, especially after Estrada was elected president in 1998. What I was trying to say was that given the poor choice of candidates in next year’s presidential election (after all who wants to choose between Arroyo and Sen. Panfilo Lacson?), I’m sure the masses would all vote for Poe. Instead of being snobby and condescending toward Poe because he hasn’t finished high school, Filipinos would do better to make the best of a less-than-perfect situation.
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