As weighty as it sounds, the legal phrase "quo warranto" is easy enough to grasp in its basic sense: It's a court proceeding undertaken to resolve a challenge to a government official's fitness to keep his or her position.
But, as may be expected of any legal concept, once deployed, it becomes oversimplified or complicated for expediency. In this case, it is deployed against Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno as an alternative to impeachment, the obvious process by which impeachable officials like her are dealt with. That quo warranto is swift and impeachment could be long-drawn-out and difficult to manage should make for a broad-enough hint why.
Given the dubious circumstances in which quo warranto was sprung, my first thoughts were of a contrivance extracted from some secret depths and exploited to serve intents not only malignant but also immediate – or it would not have been resorted to in so sudden and egregious a fashion. True enough, quo warranto comes from the medieval Latin, and it is being brought down, guillotine-like, on the neck of another Marie, this one wholly undeserving.
Surely, a Herculean stretching of the imagination will be required to make all this wash: If an impeachable official may be removed by any means other than impeachment, what judicious purpose does the alternative serve? And especially since the process of impeachment has moved well along for Sereno – the House of Representatives has decided to impeach, and the Senate is ready to try – where lies the sense of it all?
But then, neither legality nor credibility nor shame seems a consideration here. If any of that had been a consideration at all, it went out the window when justices from the Supreme Court majority – classified as such by their pack vote on issues known to be of interest to President Duterte – testified at the House hearings of their minority chief's impeachment case.
By taking part in the hearings, they were understood to have recognized impeachment as the proper process by which Sereno should be judged, and, by testifying against her, they proved themselves unworthy to judge her. In fact, they proved themselves petty, airing resentments– ill feelings conceivably borne from 4 years ago, when a young outsider came to preside over their court for the next 18 years, frustrating the ambition of any older justice to rise to chief.
The dangers of quo warranto actually lie far beyond the hijacking by the Supreme Court of the Senate's constitutional mandate to decide whether Sereno is guilty, and therefore ought to go, or not guilty, and therefore should stay; the dangers go beyond her ouster even. If that happens, she herself has warned, "No one will be safe....Everyone will have to look for a political patron to save [themselves] from incessant harassment, threats, and bullying."
The ultimate danger is in fact far worse, and that is the very fulfillment of Rodrigo Duterte's long-standing, no-secret wish – authoritarianism.
Once this conspiracy by quo warranto succeeds – and all indications are it will – the signal is out for the complete cooptation of the Supreme Court, enlisted on the cheap bargain that its disliked chief would be delivered to it for judgment. In return, it could supply Duterte with the trappings of constitutionality he will require for the supression of rights and freedoms, for arbitrary arrests and imprisonment, for summary executions, for the murder of democracy itself.
The arrangement also decidedly improves Duterte's standing with the military. While deservingly proud of its swing role in bringing down Ferdinand Marcos at the Edsa people power revolt of 1986, the military has shown some coziness to Duterte, a Marcos idolater himself – a coziness that a word of approbation from the highest court could transform to unquestioning obedience.
But how could such momentous consequences of quo warranto loom undetected by a nation that already came under Marcos – for 14 years – and now comes under a president even easier to read given his conspicuous pathological disorder? For all the fervid protests being mounted here and there, how could they remain divided by individual causes, shooting buck shots at all manner of enemies, instead of concentrating collectively on the most dangerous enemy among them?
I only hope Duterte has not found in enough of us his perfect pathological match. – Rappler.com