Wanted: Reforms on presidential pardons

This week, two Supreme Court (SC) decisions affected the political Estrada family on what amounted to a “Good News, Bad News” scenario. First, the Good News.

After months of speculation, the SC in a vote of 11-3 decided to junk the petition filed by former Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim through his lawyer Alicia Risos-Vidal seeking to disqualify former President Joseph “Erap” Estrada in the 2013 Manila mayoralty race. Apparently the SC didn’t really go into a deep research on this case and merely upheld the earlier decision by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) allowing the former President to run for mayor of Manila.

So now it can be told that the pardon given by former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to the convicted former President Erap was a full and absolute pardon, thus extinguishing any culpability “ab initio,” as if it never happened. For many years no one had an idea whether presidential pardon had any strings attached to it. Now this issue has finally been resolved with this SC decision.

Frankly speaking, when then President Gloria Arroyo gave Erap that pardon, we were totally disappointed in her. After all, Erap was the biggest fish in the pond of political corruption who was first impeached, then forcibly removed from office, hauled to court, tried and convicted of the crime of plunder in September 2007. But the deposed former President never really saw the four walls of a jail cell as he languished in a very comfortable house custody in Tanay, Rizal.

However after his conviction was declared by the Supreme Court in September 2007, a month later in October, because of letters of appeal coming from then Senate President Manuel Villar Jr., House Speaker Jose de Venecia and Cebu Archbishop Ricardo Cardinal Vidal who wrote to President Arroyo asking her to grant Erap a pardon on the grounds of “national welfare and reconciliation,” Erap was given a Presidential pardon. But honestly, we thought that this was a conditional pardon. Now we know that it was a full pardon!

In my book, what former President Arroyo did for Erap was a travesty of justice! The poor postman who stole a few thousand pesos got a long jail term… but the biggest fish in the pond of political corruption got pardoned! I chastised then Pres. Arroyo for that act… and no matter how my good friend, the late Presidential spokesman Secretary Cerge Remonde tried to appease me… I just told him to tell “Ma’am” how disappointed I was.

Erap’s pardon was concrete proof that the political elite would take care of themselves. In fact when we do have reforms in our system of governance… Presidential pardons should be done through a collegial body composed of the Executive and the Judiciary, not just the President alone.

It is for this very reason why more than a year since the expose’ that Janet Lim Napoles used faked NGO’s to plunder the national coffers in cooperation with Senators and Congressmen; only three Senators, Juan Ponce Enrile, Bong Revilla and Jinggoy Estrada have cases filed against them and have been incarcerated. This brings us to the “Bad news” scenario that the SC gave the Estrada family… when it junked Sen. Jinggoy’s petition to stop his trial for plunder in the Sandiganbayan.

At this point, the Filipino people agreed to “listen to Pope Francis” who told us “Reject all forms of corruption!” With this in mind… we would demand from the Department of Justice (DoJ) to speed up the investigation so that those in the Janet Lim Napoles list of suspected Congressmen and Senators can be tried and jailed. Most important of all… DoJ Sec. de Lima must include their allies from the Liberal Party after all corruption has no political boundaries.

There’s a huge difference between a government bureaucrat who steals a few thousand pesos from our people, though they should be made to answer for this crime. But elected government officials, like Senators and Congressmen who misused their Pork Barrels (now declared unconstitutional by the SC) or the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) who get hundreds of millions of pesos of money that would have otherwise gone to programs that would uplift the misery of our poor is a heinous crime that should not be eligible for any Presidential pardon!

I dare say that time is running out for the Aquino Regime. They talk, boast and brag about the reforms that they are doing. Yet the Filipino people have not seen any of these reforms. As we already wrote… Pope Francis has tasked the youth to help reform Philippine society. But it starts with the Aquino Regime. Today, there is a daily protest rally at the Comelec Headquarters because of the misuse of the PCOS machines. It is high time that the Comelec give up on electronic voting because it has caused massive electronic Dagdag Bawas, where the ordinary Filipino voter’s vote wasn’t counted.

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