All rise for amici curiae (2)

There are those who can’t see the forest for the trees. This entails being fixated on “individual components,” rendering one unable to “understand the larger, overall situation or big picture,” as if some ancient redwoods formed a cathedral wall that shut out the forest.

Even worse is when there’s not just an incidental but a deliberate refusal to get a more pragmatically holistic perspective to better appreciate the socio-political landscape beyond the confining grip of superfluous legalese.

No amount of erudition, mastery of law or high-sounding rhetoric could supplant what is within the ordinary man’s experience when, in a plebiscite held for the purpose, s/he ratified the 1987 Constitution. Logically, it must require another referendum if any word in the sacred constitutional text is changed, deleted or revised.

The friends of the court (FoC) may have unwittingly reduced themselves as knights in shining armor in the grand political chess matchup. It would be good if, in this hierarchy game, they have effectively elicited the desired, if preferred, elaboration likely to be accorded respect by the public at large.

There’s little to nil need to dig deeper into whether the contentious proviso is of an American or English creation. In fact, the 1935 Commonwealth Constitution stipulated a higher bar of three-fourths than just the “two-thirds of all the Members.”

Worse, the FoC only exacerbated what people thought all along — that the ruling political elites can operate under the color of the law, thereby shelving aside the revered notion that “the law is the only thing that is capable of making people equal.”

Against the backdrop of the new controlling ruling, the law is no longer a simple articulation of a public idea. The term “all” is a basic concept, so are the fraction 2/3 and the number 24. The exclusion of four senators deemed not “legally and factually capable” results in extracting 2/3 of 20, which is 13.33.

Anomalously, 13.33 is rounded up to 14. This violates standard rules in rounding numbers, whereupon 13.33 should be simply rounded down to 13, keeping the target digit the same. Only if it were 13.55 could it be rounded up to 14. In fact, to round 13 to the nearest 10 yields 10; hence, making it prudent not to mess with the arithmetic.

It’s wrought with peril if bona fide membership is reduced as an attendance or appearance issue sans death, resignation, suspension/expulsion, conviction by a court of final judgment or permanent disability. The FoC made a lot of assumptions that result in “multiple grammars of law,” call it that, effectively henceforth rewriting the Constitution itself.

Come to think of it, the governing phrase, “2/3 of all its Members,” actually breathes throughout several sections, articles, over a broad variety of ends and purposes in the constitutional text, viz.: Sections 16(3), 23(1), 27(1) of Article VI; Secs. 11, 21 of Art. VII; Sec. 3(6) of Art. XI; and Sec. 1(2) of Art. XVII.

If that does not sound like a classic case where senator-judges’ reach exceeds their grasp, then what does? It’s a tad difficult to imagine how the new “definition” could surmount the moral, legal, constitutional incongruities when applied to the aforementioned sections and articles inherently embedded in the Constitution. Every conceptual framework flows from an unfalsifiable core theory.

The base number 24 to settle membership and the 2/3 required for concurrence are not mutually exclusive. By oblique metaphor, they are partners in crime: should not be changed regardless of the temperature in the room.

Neither should these be reduced to a kind of x and y that can take different values in an equation. No, sir, a mathematical constant isn’t contingent upon a “specific problem, time or context” as the good FoC seemed to be leveraging.

The dominant, if towering, view of the FoC created a paradox best found in the Guinness World Records or Ripley’s Believe It or Not. With the maxim, “A Little Neglect May Breed Great Mischief,” let come what will — thenceforward and beyond.