Isn’t there a line missing in Tarlac Rep. Gilbert Teodoro’s burnished vitae for his bid to be national defense secretary? It doesn’t mention that Teodoro was “cat’s paw” for the failed impeachment of a chief justice under whose watch the Supreme Court scrubbed one of this battered country’s unwritten laws: “Thou shall not touch cronies’ wallets.”
Isabela Rep. Rodito Albano peddles the vitae for Teodoro: bar topnotcher, Harvard-trained, civilian – in a regime glutted “with more ex-generals than at any time since Ferdinand Marcos and martial law.” The c.v. blacks out mention that Teodoro led the notorious “Brat Pack” that flubbed its bid to impeach Chief Justice Hilario Davide.
“The Davide Court ruled against what were once sacrosanct enclaves of privilege: Mark Jimenez’s extradition, trial for Panfilo Lacson in the Kuratong Baleleng murders and the unexplained wealth of the Marcoses,” Cebu Daily News noted. “It struck down Cojuangco’s coconut levy… and declared them public funds.”
Teodoro’s uncle, Eduardo Cojuangco, along with other Marcos cronies, always insisted that the levy was a private slush fund. Theirs. So, Cojuangco’s Nationalist People’s Coalition, in October 2003, sought to impeach Davide. Among Teodoro’s hitmen were second-generation legislators from family dynasties, including Reps. “Wimpy” Fuentebella, Constantino Jaraula, John Michael Duavit, Juan Miguel Zuburi, Ramon “Ace” Durano, Gilbert Remulla, Francis Escudero.
“Members of the Brat Pack… cloak their rash and ruinous action with the noblest of intentions,” said one in a series of Inquirer editorials. This minority’s attempt to railroad the Articles of Impeachment brought the country “to the edge of anarchy.”
By impartial decisions, Davide defied gangland culture “so often he became a big threat to bosses who muzzle and buy their way into power,” sociologist Randy David observed. “Now, Davide is being taught a lesson, by the young heirs of those who always imagined themselves to be the real lords in this little corner of the world…. The Chief Justice is being shown how to defer to real power” – by the Brat Pack.
Smears preceded attempts by Teodoro et al. to railroad the case to the Senate. Full-page ads demanded impeachment because of alleged overspending by Davide and refusal to give cost-of-living allowances to court employees.
“Is this… a collision of cretins?” asked one of the Lower House’s more perceptive members, Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr. Impeachment deals with high crimes like treason or bribery, he said. But here “you have the group that successfully initiated an impeachment on the unimpeachable ground of failure to give of cost-of-living allowance.… The conundrum of the House is: how to climb, with some dignity, out of the shit hole in which a third of its members descended with such stealth…”
The Brat Pack couldn’t even get its arithmetic straight, former National Economic Development Authority head Solita Monsod wrote. She analyzed the Commission on Audit report on the Supreme Court and found employees received 89 percent, instead of just 80 percent cost-of-living allowances. “If Teodoro et al. think they can get away with it, they have another think coming,” she warned.
But Teodoro et al. listened only to – who? Not the late senator Raul Roco. He castigated President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo for waffling even as a constitutional crisis erupted. “Man begins to die when he chooses to remain silent about issues that matter,” was the Martin Luther King observation that Roco quoted to the President.
“One man, who’s not even an elected member of the House, can, through his proxies, impose his will on Congress, debase the Constitution, and push the country to the edge of another crisis,” Sen. Joker Arroyo warned. “And he’s not even accountable.”
“What if the Supreme Court ruled that the Brat Pack’s impeachment resolution is unconstitutional?” Teodoro was asked in an interview. “Then, those justices will be impeached,” he snapped. That way, “future justices will not commit the same mistake.”
“How’s that for gall?” reacted the regional paper Sun Star. Teodoro et al.’s arrogance “debased impeachment, from being a constitutional remedy of last resort into a billy stick for political vendetta.” Many hoped that a decent second generation would replace older buccaneers, the paper added. These hopes were dashed. The young whelps proved mala la manta que las cobijas, as the old Mexican proverb says. “Vicious chips from the old block.”
“A brutal oligarchy (is) on the rampage,” columnist Amando Doronila wrote as Teodoro et al. tried to bulldoze the charges through the House. “This new breed of young dynasts is less inhibited in flexing political power…. And the Court is the only state institution that (Cojuangco) has not infiltrated and the only nemesis standing in the way of his economic interests.”
The House backed away from the abyss’ edge to where the Brat Pack had shoved it. But not before the Supreme Court, voting 13-1, struck down their articles as unconstitutional. And a voice from the grave reminds us what we escaped from.
“If you persist, you’ll spin a crazy top that could drive our fragile democracy over the cliff,” the late columnist Teodoro Benigno told the Brat Pack – and their Boss. “Chaos and anarchy could ensue. Behind them bristle the guns of a military only too eager and anxious. Is this what we want?”
No. But Rep. Teodoro and his principal salivate to control a military their Brat Pack couldn’t corral. And they’re betting on our amnesia, plus a doctored vitae, to get it.
