MANY OF former senator Bongbong Marcos’ followers would probably treat the petition to disqualify their idol as a trivial annoyance, if not with contempt. That unknown figure means potentially the number of voters that the son and namesake of a former dictator needs to enthrone him as the next president of the Philippines. The new attempt to remove him from the list of presidential candidates in 2022 is par for the course. It’s just the usual political ‘noise-sance’ when some never-do-well politicians are roused from their brief hibernation and play the antiquarian snake oil salesman’s trick again.
The background is perfect cover. It’s open season for muck and mud wrestling, the political equivalent of the Darwinian theory on the survival of the fittest, reinvented every season , and the dirtier, the merrier. It’s not necessarily the one who has less mud or muck or throws more at the opponent that emerges the winner. You’d be surprised.
So it goes logically that the camp of Bongbong is equally dismissive, if not downright derisive. It’s just a nuisance, a propaganda petit . It’s made to look like it’s not worth any dignified effort to deserve the legal or moral comment at the moment. Even trash can be recycled. Suffice it to say, so the initial evasive public relations tactic goes, that the camp, or its lawyer, hasn’t received a copy of the damaging petition just filed. In the meantime, the embattled principal is silent on the issue and deflects responsibility to respond in an open– and – shut manner to the lawyer.
But a political analyst doesn’t think so. Damaging, according to him, is only part of the political calculus whose dynamic might have already been changed by the disqualification try. The aftershocks can be more earth-shaking, either way. For one, it could create a dent in the phalanx of Bongbong supporters, from the flamboyant ones to the Bongbong Lites (the so-called secret candidates} hiding in plain sight. On the other hand, it could also draw sympathy from the middle –of- the- road electorate, the progressives as well as those lazy enough to consider the lessons of the past.
In short, it’s both good and bad. How it ends up depends on how the players involved in the crucial issue will navigate the shifty ground of the country’s judicial system that has shown its imperfection or flexibility through the years, especially when challenged by a rule-less despot, or would-be clone. One lawyer puts it more realistically: it’s not enough that you are on the right side; it’s as important that you have the wherewithal, financial and otherwise, to see it through. The sheer intense of the crucible appears to have caused a principles meltdown, even among the best of them. So, as it turned out, a fake hero is interred in the pantheons of the authentic.
The case for disqualifying Bongbong is not something to sneeze at. There is an unassailable legal basis: he was convicted for tax evasion when he was vice governor and governor of Ilocos Norte from 1981 to 1985. He was fined but not given a jail sentence, a legal conundrum among those who know their law. Well, there have been judges disrobed in the past for ignorance of the law. The Bongbong tax evasion case was a big-ticket item , and that partly may explain the conviction.
Former Supreme Court justice Antonio Carpio has explained why the disqualification case shouldn’t be viewed nonchalantly as a piece of cake or a walk in the park. He cited two laws that can make the COMELEC or eventually the High Court kick Bongbong in the butt. There is the Omnibus Election Code that provides for disqualification of any candidate convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude. He anticipated where Bongbong’s legal camp would be coming from. He has in mind a previous Supreme Court ruling that even when a person hasn’t been sentenced to a jail term as part of the punishment, the same is still accountable for moral turpitude.
Then there is the Tax Code to contend with. The Code provides that any public officer penalized for a crime for violating tax laws is perpetually barred from holding public office, among others.
So the petitioners to disqualify Bongbong must like their chances. One of two isn’t bad at all, considering who’s on the opposite pole.
On the other hand, the Bongbong camp can anchor their hopes on at least three things: 1) Presidential spokesman Harry Roque’s previous comment that 10 lawyers can have 11 different kinds of opinion on a legal issue. 2) The Supreme Court, as cited by Carpio himself, has also ruled that moral turpitude is not easy to define and depends partly on circumstances. 3) COMELEC has coincidentally remarked that the jury is still out on what constitutes moral turpitude, although it later clarified that the commentary has nothing to do with the pending disqualification case before it.
Carpio has invoked the higher road beyond what the law says. Leadership, whether you are president or not, requires a good moral character. At the end of the day, that should be the final argument on the disqualification case at bar, although there’s a wide gulf separating what is legal and what is moral in these parts, especially where tax evasion is more common than jaywalking.
