Chief Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno has promised to expedite the resolution of Interior and Local Government Secretary Manuel Roxas’s five-year-old electoral protest against Vice President Jejomar C. Binay before the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, i.e. the Supreme Court en banc. This has caught many, mostly non-lawyers, by surprise. We had thought all along that Roxas had given up his electoral protest when he accepted a position in the Aquino Cabinet, just as Miriam Defensor Santiago gave up her 1992 electoral protest against the election of President Fidel V. Ramos when she ran and won in the succeeding election for the Senate. It can be argued that if Roxas had been a Cabinet member when he ran for Vice President, the law would have required him to resign upon filing his certificate of candidacy; for that reason, he cannot and should not be sitting in the Cabinet now, while sill technically “running” for Vice-President, which is the equivalent of his electoral protest.

I am not quoting any law here, simply appealing to logic, and it is for the High Court to decide. Under the Constitution, “the Supreme Court sitting en banc, shall be the sole judge of all contests relating to the election, returns, and qualifications of the President or Vice-President, and may promulgate its rules for the purpose.” The Court should have disposed of this protest years ago, but since it has failed to do so, it should terminate it now, before the disputed six-year term expires. We have seen too many electoral protests, involving members of Congress and other officials, which were resolved, hilariously, only on the last day of the disputed term of office, and the winning protestant did not even have a single day to sit.

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