Politics and the rule of law

PRINCIPLED politics is a contradiction in terms: mutually exclusive, diametrically opposed, for in politics “no one acts on principles or reasons from them.”
There is that generalization arising from the fixity of our intellectual habits that deems the recurring characteristic trait of a segment of one species as representative of that species, if not of the whole genus. Thus, taken on the whole, politicians are “…the vilest and the narrowest of sycophants and courtiers that humanity has ever known; their sole end basely to flatter and develop all popular prejudices, which, for the rest, they but vaguely share, never having consecrated one minute of their lives to reflection and observation.”
And, Monsieur Leroy Beaullieu did not even live long enough to read of the Filipino politician, writing as he was of the French kind in the 1890s. So what’s the difference between a Filipino politician and dalag? One is a voracious filth-feeding bottom dweller. The other is a fish.
Expediency and convention, utility and interests – self-serving, vested interests, are the fundamental matters – I could not dare write principles here and desecrate the word – whence politics breeds.
In no single recent issue – political, naturally – are all the above “matters” instanced than in the ConCom-forged body of recommendations for Charter change submitted to the President. Need I elaborate?
Okay, Simplicio Simon: It is expedient – highly utilitarian too – to the embattled administration as it acts as a lightning rod to deflect the more pressing issues of colossal corruption, pervasive poverty and the question of legitimacy; convention – the well-worn ejaculation of “ the rule of law” at play here palliates the restive but un-militant sectors and soothes the indifferent mass, auguring well for GMA; and best of all, its No-El provision caters solely to the interests, and whets the insatiable appetites for pelf and power of the sitting politicians.
The rule of law. How many crimes have been inflicted upon the people in its name? To prevent anarchy in the streets and restore the rule of law, so Marcos’ proclaimed Martial Law. To prevent disruptive rallies and restore the rule of law, so Macapagal-Arroyo issued those EOs.
In the context of the impeachment complaint against the President, the “rule of law” that was invoked by a compliant, if not kowtowing Congress, in its railroading was a rule, yes, but not of Law. It was simply the rule of numbers.
Consider these universal givens:
Stripped to its essentials, Law is a “function of Reason,” as Aquinas put it. Kant furthered: “the expression of the Reason common to all.”
Law is “the rational or ethical will” of the body politic; “…the principal and most perfect branch of ethics,” as the British jurist Sir William Blackstone wrote in his Commentaries.
Thus, in the foiled impeachment case, the subsumption of a moral inquiry, nay, its nullification on mere technicality, no matter how “legal,” is a travesty of Law. As factored in the above-given “truths.”
Aquinas, still in Summa Theologica: “Laws enacted by men are either just or unjust. If they are just, they have a binding force in the court of conscience from the Eternal Law, whence they are derived…Unjust laws are not binding in the court of conscience, except, perhaps, for the avoiding of scandal and turmoil.” Touche. But, really now, has conscience a place in Philippine political praxis?
The “rule of law” in its application hereabouts takes primary place among those that a forgotten jurist said were “…laws of comfort adopted by free agents in pursuit of their advantage.”
Time for us all to reflect on “the doctrine that the universe is governed in all things by Law, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power.”
And to those misnomered solons: “To interpret the Law, and to bring it into harmony with the varying conditions of human society is the highest task of the legislator.” Not to vote NO to impeachment.
(Pampanga News, Jan. 19-25, 2006)