Some people never learn. Not only do they not learn from their mistakes, but they never learned certain fundamental traits that have served mankind well: Humility, loyalty, sincerity and gratitude, to name some, cannot make one go wrong.

On the other hand, pride and sanctimony have always led to perdition. Coupled with the inexorable laws of karma, there is no way but down for those people.

Case in point: Leila de Lima. Plucked from relative obscurity by President Gloria Arroyo, she was but a second-rate election lawyer in the shadows of such prominent practitioners as Tata Romy Macalintal and the late Pete Quadra.

De Lima’s first claim to fame was as chairman of the Commission on Human Rights. Quickly aligning herself with the “Yellows,” she quickly became an enabler of the leftist agenda of persecuting government officials — including military and police — whose only crime was fighting the long-festering communist insurgents and narco-traffickers.

Leveraging her position, she was appointed secretary of justice by the late unlamented President Noynoy Aquino. Flushed with the pomp of a Cabinet position, she lost no time pandering to her new boss by filing unfounded cases of electoral sabotage and plunder against her patroness, President Arroyo, using the flimsiest of reasons: the testimony of a mass murderer, Norie Unas; and a marginal note on a piece of paper.

While she was not expected to bend the law in covering up for a former mentor, she also should not have transgressed the law by practically framing up Mrs. Arroyo. The fact that she did, did not sit well with a people culturally steeped in the concept of utang na loob. Thus, in the 2016 senatorial race, she made it only by the skin of her teeth.

That former President Arroyo was, firstly, granted bail in the electoral sabotage case for paucity of evidence, and later on acquitted for both that case and for plunder (by no less than the Supreme Court), should have taught her a valuable lesson in the perils of filing baseless cases.

But no! As a senator, she had to engage in denouncing the supposed “crimes” of then President Duterte before the halls of the Senate. Her subsequent prosecution and imprisonment for drug trafficking, she attributed to harassment by Duterte and his people. Alas, the excuse is poor, since I know, personally and factually, that the evidence against her has existed long before Duterte was even on the national political landscape.

At any rate, hypocritically enlisting the aid of international organizations to focus attention on her false “plight” as a political detainee — a practice which she condemned when it was Mrs. Arroyo who did so — and with a friendlier political atmosphere when 2022 ushered in the reign of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., — she was acquitted.

Strangely, she lost no time thanking Marcos Jr. for her exoneration, while it was the courts who did so. In light of her being a lawyer and fully cognizant of the doctrine of separation of powers, methinks she may know something we don’t.

Sadly for her, people do not believe she is innocent. Her quasi-confession of her affair with her married driver, invoking “frailties of woman,” instead of making the public forgive her, inspired nothing but derision and jokes about her “screwdriver.”

Her miserable reelection defeat in the 2022 elections — notwithstanding the advantages of incumbency and formidable machinery and her almost daily plaints of being a victim of oppression by the Duterte government — shows that her protestations of innocence have rung hollow.

With surveys showing that it is impossible for her to win nationally, she has turned her attention to having her party list elected, to give her a seat in the House. In so doing, she thinks she can buck karma. If she loses again, then it will be another notch in her bad karma catching up with her. But if she wins, then the karma will sadly be on the Filipino people.