HINDSIGHT

HINDSIGHT

By Ray Alan T. Drilon

On hindsight the successful impeachment of CJ Corona may have a chilling effect upon the High Court Magistrates, who until lately, have been comfortable in their Ivory Tower, imperious in their mighty chairs handing down Judgments which could make or unmake the lives or fortune of puny man.

The lofty office of our Magistrates, may be high, but lonely. Perhaps because they sit above and cloistered, they have become too distant, detached, cold,  and confidently  secure  in the position they hold and in the power they wield. Could it be that in this pedestal they have grown exceedingly steep in their own sense of righteousness? 

Our Jurists are supposed to be impervious to any kind of influence, and are not swayed by any kind of views, sentiments, even popular opinion, except their own, or, what the law says, or, what their interpretation of the law is. They are supreme and final in their pronouncements. Their word becomes law.

The impeachment of no less than the Chief Justice of the High Court, pricks the bubble. It gives a very strong signal that the Brethren’s  Ivory Tower is, vulnerable, after all.

I have mixed feelings, though, about this.

Impeachment indeed is the built-in constitutional mechanism to check on the excesses of the Judiciary’s high and the mighty. And yet it is a double edged sword, for when the great Solons of the land, decided to scale the Bretheren’s Ivory Tower and traverse its hallowed halls,  deposing the Chief of Magistrates, could it be possible that they might have unwittingly chipped away the weakest point in the Ivory Tower’s foundation, which is its untrammeled independence.

The great Solons indeed have shown that the power of impeachment is their mighty tool to cast down erring kings and chiefs. They have used it and shown that the system works. Did it imbue them with the grand feeling to sit as Judges of the Judge?  Or was it because they were called out not to be judges but as guardians of righteousness. I hope it is the latter.

This is the reason why this power is entrusted to the wise. The law makers of the land are presumed to be wise, for if this power be held and wielded with an evil eye, where would the Blind Lady Justice be? 

On the lighter side, the common people’s exhilaration in seeing how an abstract concept like “impeachment” could at least be understood as it played out in this drama is a unique learning experience.     

God Bless our country and people.