I sometimes wonder if the political opposition would not have jumped on President Rodrigo Duterte like it did if he had not declared martial law in Mindanao. Then I think about how, instead of helping unite the nation against the common threat posed by the bloodthirsty Maute terror gang, the opposition seems fixated on finding fault in how Duterte’s government is responding to the crisis, and I wonder no more.
I think that because the opposition to Duterte seems hard-wired to oppose anything he does, for good or for ill, they will still be raking him over the coals if he did not declare martial law. Maybe it’s just me, but I can actually imagine Edcel Lagman and the rest of the opposition taunting Duterte for “going soft” on terrorists if he had not declared military rule.
But all of this is a mere prelude to introducing one of my favorite legal analysts, Jemy Gatdula, the Cambridge-trained lecturer on international law at the University of Asia and the Pacific. Gatdula’s occasional Facebook posts are always notable for their brilliance, which cuts through the toxic smog that usually envelops most social media discourse on current affairs like a laser beam.
Yesterday, Gatdula said the current kerfuffle in the Supreme Court was really the unnecessary result of Duterte’s declaration of martial law in Mindanao, something that he really didn’t need to do. Simply by exercising his powers as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Gatdula argued, Duterte could have done all that he needed to do to put down the uprising of the IS-inspired Maute Group in Marawi City.
“[Duterte] could have employed the full force of the military without need of a martial law declaration and without need of admitting partial loss of control that a martial law declaration [conditioned on the presence of invasion or rebellion] naturally brings,” Gatdula wrote. “Unless of course the intention was to dramatically present an environment of local or national crisis to the public.”
Congress, Gatdula explained, also erred in not convening in joint session to give its stamp of approval to Duterte’s Proclamation 216. “[When] Congress did not conduct a joint session… the Supreme Court [was given] the opening to conduct the ongoing proceedings, creating an impression of conflicting institutions precisely at a time when national unity and focus should be on eliminating urgent problems,” he said.
Gatdula does not spare the Supreme Court, either, because it “is not designed to look into facts but only [into] issues of law.” If Congress conducted the review of the factual basis by way of joint session after Duterte issued the proclamation, “then the Supreme Court’s mandate and its sense of judicial restraint should have limited it to only reviewing procedural requirements,” he wrote.
There was error all around. The bottomline, according to Gatdula, is that “these Supreme Court proceedings would have been unnecessary had Congress conducted the joint session and [the] joint session would have been unnecessary had the President not invoked martial law and instead relied on his commander-in-chief powers to suppress lawless violence.”
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Of course, Gatdula’s excellent treatise is anchored on the presumption that the critics of Duterte are really concerned about what errors—legal or otherwise —that he may have committed in addressing the Marawi situation, instead of just finding fault in whatever he does, wherever and whenever he does it. My own reading of the opposition is that it will even risk the easy and perfectly logical conclusion that it is in bed with the terrorists, if it will be afforded the opportunity to lash out at the president.
(Having been a consistent critic of the previous administration, I know exactly what it’s like to be on the wrong side of the government in power. But I always tried not to fall off the deep end of criticism, which I defined as finding fault in everything that Noynoy Aquino did, even when he was doing something right; that Aquino didn’t do a lot of things right —or that he didn’t do a lot of needful things at all—is no longer my fault, I think.)
For instance, speaking of Lagman, who is leading the charge in the Supreme Court to have Duterte’s Proclamation 216 voided, I really wonder why he has gone before the tribunal instead of doing his thing in the Batasang Pambansa. Why didn’t Lagman even author a resolution in the House questioning the legality of the proclamation, like some senators did when the martial law edict was brought before the Senate for voting?
The inescapable conclusion, I think, is that Lagman and his fellow remnants of the Yellow regime frame everything Duterte does on a presumption of irregularity. And that it is high time for the citizenry to call out these political opportunists who cannot seem to find anything right in what Duterte does.
In the case of the Marawi crisis, I will repeat my challenge to Lagman and the rest: Come up with a better, workable alternative on how to best deal with the depredations of the Maute Gang, then we’ll talk.
If they can’t, then they really have no business parsing definitions of rebellion and invasion and forcing the Supreme Court to rule on facts that it does not have in its possession. It’s really that simple.