(Eagle News) — Senators Antonio Trillanes IV and Leila de Lima have asked the Supreme Court to allow them to intervene and oppose the quo warranto petition filed against Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno.
In a five-page motion, Trillanes and De Lima said as “citizens, taxpayers and senators of the Republic,” they “have the right and duty to uphold the Constitution and to oppose government actions that are clearly patently unconstitutional.”
They added they also have a “personal and official legal interest in the outcome of the instant petition” filed by Solicitor General Jose Calida against Sereno, as the matter “concerns the prerogatives of the Senate as an independent and co-equal branch of government and the duties of senators as judges in an impeachment trial.”
“Petitioners are simply raising their opposition to the arguments submitted by the Republic in its petition, to defend their prerogatives as senator-judges in an impeachment trial, and to protect the institution of impeachment as a mode of enforcing accountability,” they said.
“Diminution of impeachment clause”
In opposing the quo warranto petition, De Lima and Trillanes argued in their attached opposition-in-intervention that the Constitution “vests in the Senate the sole power to try and decide all cases of impeachment.”
According to them, “any proceeding whose aim is to remove an impeachable public officer outside an impeachment trial in the Senate is a palpable violation of the Constitution.”
“It is a diminution of the impeachment clause, a circumvention of the exclusive character of an impeachment, and incompatible with the design of the Constitution,” they said.
They also noted that Sereno cannot be removed because of what Calida said was her “lack of integrity” stemming from her alleged non-filing of several Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth because “integrity is not a constitutional qualification..but also a matter addressed to the Senate as an impeachment body.”
“The Solicitor General cannot, in the guise of questioning an impeachable public officer’s appointment, raise questions before the Supreme Court that are exclusively constitutionally addressed to other branches of government…The petition for quo warranto therefore undermines the impeachment clause and the powers of the House of Representatives and the Senate,” they said.
The SC has directed Sereno to attend oral arguments on the quo warranto petition on April 10 at 2 p.m., in the SC session hall in Baguio.
The SC has junked the motion filed by several leaders of progressive groups to intervene in the quo petition against the Chief Justice, and “noted” the one filed by the Integrated Bar of the Philippines.
An impeachment complaint has also been filed against Sereno, who has been on leave since March 1.