Aquino: Next Chief Justice will be the best | Inquirer News

Aquino: Next Chief Justice will be the best | Inquirer News

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President Benigno Aquino III assured the nation that the next Chief Justice will be the “best” for the country and will be “no lapdog.”

In an ANC interview before Christmas Day, the President took issue with Corona’s recent speech where the latter slammed him for supposedly wanting to appoint a new Chief Justice that he could hold by the neck.

The President told ANC anchor Lynda Jumilla that in the search for a new Chief Justice his criteria would not include that the candidate follow Palace orders.

“Getting a lapdog is not and has never been part of the concept that exists in our family.”

“At the end of the day, whoever I appoint I would have to be able to look at any of our countrymen and say: ‘This is the best.’”

Mr. Aquino also reiterated why his administration wanted a change in the leadership of the Supreme Court, currently headed by impeached Chief Justice Renato Corona.

He said it was wrong for any branch of government to be “untouchable.”
“I never thought I’d quote him (but it was) Senator Arturo Tolentino who said quite a long while back that he was nervous about the autonomy…the growing power of the Supreme Court….There might come a point wherein it was no longer effectively being checked and balanced by the other two co-equal branches,” President Aquino continued.

Tolentino was a close ally of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and once served as vice president to the latter for a brief time before the first people power revolt catapulted the President’s mother, the late Corazon Aquino, to the presidency.

Asked whether he thought the country was at a point where the high court had too much autonomy and independence that it was now untouchable, he replied: “It’s at a point where no one…in practice nobody could review what they (the high court) has done.”

“It seems no one challenges whether (or not the Supreme Court decisions) are right. Could their perception be right? And I think I made public the issues that we find disagreement with,” he said.
Corona’s impeachment trial, he said, was a “step embodied in the Constitution which resolves a conflict of this nature.”

Meanwhile, Supreme Court administrator and spokesperson Jose Midas Marquez on Wednesday criticized President Aquino for being “presumptuous and arrogant” in ordering his legal advisers to look for a would-be successor to Chief Justice Corona.

In a press briefing, Marquez reminded Malacañang that the Constitution explicitly states that only the Judicial and Bar Council (JBC) was authorized to screen and select candidates for justices of the high tribunal.
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