EDITORIAL - Judicial appointments are chronological accidents

There is now a furious controversy over whether the president should appoint a new chief justice when Reynato Puno retires on May 17 or leave that for the next president to do, which is not going to happen anytime before July 1 at the earliest.

If President Arroyo goes ahead and makes the appointment, she shall have gone and done something unprecedented, that of having appointed all 15 members of the Supreme Court. But even if she declines making the appointment, having appointed 14 of 15 members is itself unequalled.

And that has also been a raging controversy of sorts, fanned largely by critics of the president who have made it their bread and butter to never give her any quarter. They have even gone on to label the court as an Arroyo court, a tag exasperatingly unfair to both parties.

There is no glossing over the fact that all but one of the justices have been Arroyo appointees. But the critics of the president unfairly leave it at that, as if that is the story in its entirety.

But the fact of the matter, and the one that is never brought to light by the critics, is that Arroyo made the appointments because she was mandated to do so. It is her job and her duty to make the appointments whenever vacancies occur. It was not her fault that vacancies did occur.

By stopping short of explaining why 14 of 15 Supreme Court justices are Arroyo appointees her critics are making it appear that in the matter of filling up positions in the high court, everything depended on her.

Her critics have maliciously refrained from saying she had nothing to do with any vacancy occurring but that once they occur she is duty-bound to fill them. All that they want to appear is that Arroyo had been filling the high court with her appointees, now pegged at 14.

Even the media is negligent in this regard. Each time it is reported that 14 of 15 justices are Arroyo appointees, they stop short of putting things into context. In the end, they not only put Arroyo in a bad light, which is probably the objective, but the justices as well.

To become a justice of the Supreme Court is the apex of a judicial career. It probably is the goal of everyone in the legal profession. Yet how unfair it is to be doubted simply because of the chronological accident of having been appointed in the time of Arroyo as president.