Leila, SC be damned? Again?

Leila, SC be damned? Again? | Daily Tribune

Once more clad in her full moral armor, comes now Leila de Lima hoisting the banner of constitutionalism while brandishing a rusty sword called “judicial overreach.” This time around, she’s not the justice secretary defying the Supreme Court (SC) --- she’s a congresswoman acting like she outranks it, even if she prefaces her contempt for the court with, “with all due respect.”

With her signature flair for self-anointment, De Lima has declared the SC resolution seeking clarificatory details on Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment “very disconcerting.” According to her, asking whether the fourth complaint was properly circulated or if the House Secretary-General had sat on the earlier ones is somehow an affront to democracy.

“I’m not saying don’t ask questions,” she seems to imply, “just not about us.”

How can we forget? This is far from her maiden tango with the so-called gods of Padre Faura, as, in 2011, she led an executive branch defiance against it. As the justice secretary of then-President Noynoy Aquino, she ignored a temporary restraining order (TRO) issued by the SC allowing former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to leave for medical treatment abroad.

There, at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, in full public view, she reduced the judiciary’s authority to nothing. Arroyo, in a wheelchair and neck brace, was humiliated while Leila basked in the applause of a morally intoxicated yellow mob.

It took years, but the Supreme Court would deliver its verdict: the order Leila enforced — Department of Justice Circular 41 — was unconstitutional. In other words, she broke the law to enforce her will. She did not just scuttle a TRO — she threw the Constitution into the trash bin, wrapped in a veneer of righteous indignation.

And now she dares lecture the Supreme Court? Again?

Let’s examine her argument this time: that the SC has no business inquiring about an impeachment that the House, in her view, had “initiated properly” via a complaint signed by 215 lawmakers.

This is amid the complaint of Vice President Duterte and Mindanaoan lawyers who petitioned the SC, arguing that the House leadership manipulated the timing. That, according to Duterte, the first three complaints were iced deliberately to avoid triggering the one-year constitutional bar. If true, that is a form of legislative sleight of hand.

Surely, if the House itself has exploited a loophole in the Constitution to impeach a political enemy without the burden of scrutiny, it falls squarely within the Court’s mandate to intervene. This isn’t “judicial overreach” — this is judicial responsibility.

De Lima practically calls the questions raised by the Court “petty.” Really? Questions like: Did members have time to read what they were signing? Was the fourth complaint the only one worthy of action? Why were the first three entombed in bureaucracy?

In De Lima’s worldview, anything that slows down the path to political martyrdom — or perhaps just headlines — is a threat to democracy. But when she was justice secretary, she had no trouble disrespecting a Supreme Court order when it suited her own crusade.

Here’s how the narrative looks like: Leila the persecuted, Leila the comeback kid, Leila the institutional conscience. It’s a tempting plotline, but it unravels when held against the record.

This is a woman who once claimed moral supremacy over the law itself. Now she’s back, cloaking political gamesmanship in legal jargon, hoping we’ve all forgotten that fateful day at NAIA when she said, in effect, “The Supreme Court be damned.”

Well, some of us haven’t forgotten.

In a functioning democracy, no one is above the law — not the Vice President, not the President and certainly not a former justice secretary who once believed she could overrule the nation’s highest court by sheer force of indignation.

So let the Court ask its questions. Let Congress answer them. Let the impeachment trial proceed, or not — but let’s not be badgered by someone who once put the law in a chokehold and now acts like its patron saint.

We’ve seen this act before, and once is enough. Leila, spare us your antics.