Saturday, October 07, 2006 Carvajal: Dark clouds in the political horizon By Orlando P. Carvajal
This tops it all. The Office of the Ombudsman overrules and defies (tell me how else to interpret it) the Supreme Court and instead completely exonerates all the parties in the illegal purchase of Automatic Counting Machines (ACM). Only in the Philippines is a scandal resolved with a bigger scandal for this to me has all the makings of a humongous legal blunder.
One does not have to be a lawyer to see the irregularity. The Supreme Court has decreed the contract to be illegal and has even ordered the Comelec to return the ACMs. (This order the Comelec has long defied.) If the current Ombudsman now says nobody is guilty of any illegal purchase, is she not defying the Supreme Court? How can there be an illegal act but nobody guilty of it?
I’d like to see how Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez gets out of this mess.
There is no good explanation for her action, the reason why those who disagree are simply asked by her office to file a motion for reconsideration.
But who will reconsider, the Ombudsman who had the temerity to overturn a Supreme Court decision?
The only possible explanation for such insanity can be found somewhere in her previous life as presidential chief legal counsel and a classmate of First Gentleman Jose Miguel Arroyo. People will never believe that it is just by coincidence that she was all that to the First Couple. In any case, people cannot be blamed for seeing the hand of PGMA in this. Ombudsman Gutierrez ought to just resign.
Our worst fears have just been confirmed. The administration has no intention whatsoever of instituting reforms in the electoral system. It definitely does not want any Comelec revamp. Worse still, the opposition is not raising any howl and like the administration wants the status quo in the Comelec. With status quo they can simply take turns exploiting the country by using the weaknesses of both the system and the personalities manning the system to win in elections.
That is why neither administration nor opposition pushed for the publication much less implementation of the Davide Report.
Moreover, in the midst of all the allegations of cheating neither administration nor opposition made any moves to impeach the Comelec. If there was not enough proof that the Comelec abetted cheating in 2004, people were hoping that the ACM scam could be the basis for impeaching at least some Comelec officials. Ombudsman Gutierrez has just removed that basis.
It is looking very grim for us in the coming elections of 2007. A Comelec that has just lost its last ounce of credibility is going to be the watchdog in the elections of 2007. There are ominously dark clouds gathering in our political horizon.
