THERE is no compelling reason why Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio and two other magistrates should inhibit themselves from the case arising from the Senate Electoral Tribunal’s decision saying Senator Grace Poe is a natural-born Filipino because the case is filed with the Supreme Court, a veteran election lawyer said Sunday.
Romulo Macalintal said the inhibition of Carpio, chairman of the nine-member SET, and members Associate Justices Teresita Leonardo de Castro and Arturo Brion, who voted to disqualify Poe as senator, would violate the high court’s standing policy on this issue.
Macalintal made his statement even as former Justice Secretary and Liberal Party senatorial bet Leila De Lima said Sunday she believed the failure to quickly resolve the disqualification cases against presidential candidate Grace Poe might cause confusion among the voters on election day.
De Lima, a former election lawyer, explained possible consequences of Poe’s disqualification given that there were less than 15 days before the Commission on Elections releases the final list of candidates.
“If the issues won’t be resolved and her name is printed on the ballot, but after that she is disqualified with finality, many voters might still vote for her thinking she is still a candidate,” De Lima told reporters in Cebu City.
Macalintal cited a 1997 case of Libanan vs the House of Representatives Electoral Tribunal where the Supreme Court rejected such offer of inhibition made by three justices from participating in the resolution of the petition filed with it involving a case they decided at the HRET.
In Libanan vs HRET, the high court cited a 1949 case where it had been its position that the designation of its members in the electoral tribunals did not deduct “a whit from their functions as members of the Supreme Court, and did not disqualify them in this litigation.”
The Court said their participation in the high court “will not operate to prevent them from voting in the electoral [tribunals] on identical questions because the Constitution, establishing no incompatibility between the two roles, naturally did not contemplate, nor want, justices opining one way here, and thereafter holding otherwise, pari materia, [upon the same subject], in the electoral tribunal, or vice-versa.”
“Thus, the SC emphasized in the Libanan case that since it has been its position to reject offer of inhibition of SC justices in the electoral tribunals when the cases they decided thereat are brought to the SC for review, “so it should be in all cases that may yet come before this Court,” Macalintal said.
He said it had been a standing policy of the high court to reject such offer of inhibition.
“In other words, there is no compelling reason for Carpio and the other two SC justices to disqualify themselves from the SET case of Poe and from other cases involving the latter that may yet to come before the SC,” Macalintal said.