Minus the drama, the sobs, the tales of personal pain, the walk-out, the heart attack, the touching scene of reconciliation among estranged cousins, and the charges of a conspiracy between Malaca?ang and the Left to oust him from office, Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona?s testimony before the Senate Impeachment Court sounded like a simplistic reasoning of a pedestrian caught jaywalking.
There was a lot of expectation and excitement over the appearance of the Chief Magistrate of the Highest Court of the Land before the Impeachment Court to answer charges that he instigated the flip-flopping decision of the Supreme Court on the case of the dismissed employees of the Philippines Airlines, that he engineered the hasty issuance of a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) to allow former President Macapagal-Arroyo to leave the country to avoid prosecution and that he did not truthfully reflect his assets and net worth in his annual Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Networth.
The 3-hour ?opening statement? was a classic adherence to the strategy of ?appeal to emotion? which we used during our college debates to cover up what the debater could not effectively argue through ?appeal to reason.?
The presentation was a picture of a simple man who lived frugally, without even a housemaid at home and no air-conditioning unit, who saved his earnings and placed these in both dollar and peso accounts.
Not a few observers said that Corona?s strategy of presenting himself as just another human being, an ordinary Filipino who happened to be named Chief Justice, somehow tugged the hearts and gained sympathizers, never mind the loopholes in his narrative like when he said that he started saving his dollars in 1969, even when Filipinos were allowed by law to open dollar accounts only in 1974.
But for those who expected to hear sharp and erudite retorts given his lofty position as the Chief Justice had a big letdown.
Nowhere and never in his 3-hour testimony did Chief Justice Corona display legal brilliance in parrying the accusations and justifying his actions using plausible rational justification.
His attempt to discredit the report of Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales on the number of dollar accounts that he had was a classic example of a boy trying to lessen his guilt for stealing eggs from a neighbor?s poultry house by saying that he got only six eggs and not one dozen as alleged.
?It?s four, not 82 (for the dollar accounts),? and ?It?s three not 31,? were his statements in saying that Ombudsman Morales was merely peddling lies about the number of his bank accounts.
Conveniently, Chief Justice Corona did not touch the PAL issue and the Supreme Court TRO on a government hold departure order against former President Macapagal-Arroyo during his long testimony.
In spite of the hollowness of the testimony, there were those who wanted to believe him and give him the benefit of the doubt, until he hastily stood up and left the Senate hall after imperiously declaring ?Now, the Chief Justice of the Republic of the Philippines wishes to be excused.?
From an ordinary human being capable of committing acts of omission, Corona was suddenly transformed into the mighty Chief Justice, who, by virtue of his position, should no longer be subjected to debasing probes by the Senator judges.
But Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile was not shocked or awed, neither was he convinced that Chief Justice Corona was an inch taller than anybody else.
And when he came back Friday, Chief Justice Corona was unmasked by very simple questions, especially the one posed by Sen. Francis Pangilinan who asked why, if indeed the millions of dollars he kept in the bank were earned through hard work, ?Why did you not just declare it??
The feeble answer was a reference to a foreign currency law which guarantees absolute secrecy of dollar deposits.
There was never an attempt to share his legal prowess in interpreting for the common Filipino which would prevail, a Constitutional provision on the declaration of his assets and net worth, or a Republic Act guaranteeing the secrecy of bank deposits.
This is not the brilliant Chief Magistrate who could recite the law regardless of who would suffer as a result of his interpretation; this is just an ordinary human being seeking refuge in the ambiguity of the law to justify a wrong deed.
At the end of the whole process, the Filipino people saw Renato Corona for what he really is: An ordinary human being, the very image he wanted the country to appreciate, not realizing that by doing that he admitted that he does not have the brilliance and the integrity to remain as the Chief Justice of the Highest Court of the Land.
