Erap has strong knees (He just can't stop running)

Say what?

So the COMELEC, the very same institution that banned ANG LADLAD from running because they think that the party promotes immorality is allowing ERAP and GMA to run for president.

Ha?

Lack of a backbone it is. From here.

Passing the buck
Philippine Daily InquirerFirst Posted 22:12:00 01/21/2010Filed Under: Elections
MANILA, Philippines--The decision of the ever-more- controversial second division of the Commission on Elections to allow former President Joseph Estrada to run for president again is, in a word, spineless. It is bureaucratic cowardice masquerading as populist philosophy. We share the view of millions of Filipinos that the Constitution—and the Constitution alone—bars Estrada from running for the presidency again. But if the Comelec had allowed the former president, convicted but immediately pardoned of the crime of plunder in 2007, to run on solid legal grounds, we would have respected the reasoning behind the ruling.

Instead, we have this: “In the end, it is the Filipino people who would act as the final arbiter on whether they would have Estrada sit again as president. It is the electorate’s choice of who their president should be. The better policy approach is to let the people decide who will be the next president.” The basic idea in the second division’s decision is said three times, perhaps because, stated baldly, by itself, its thinness as an argument cannot be disguised. But repeated, it sounds almost reasonable.

There is just one problem with it: It undermines the Comelec’s own power to screen candidates for the presidency. If it is indeed true, as the division chaired by Commissioner Nicodemo Ferrer asserts, that the “better policy approach is to let the people decide who will be the next president,” why did the commission disqualify dozens of aspiring candidates? Set aside, for now, the question of qualifications imposed by the Constitution itself: Assuming that all aspirants who had filed certificates of candidacy met the basic qualifications, why allow only 10 to run if the “better policy approach” is to let the electorate decide?

The second division’s main justification for allowing Estrada to run again, therefore, does not justify anything. It merely passes the responsibility for deciding on Estrada’s qualification, under cover of a populist let-the-people-decide argument, to the Supreme Court.

But we also share the common view that it is in fact one of the Comelec’s most crucial responsibilities to screen presidential (and other) candidates. To follow the Estrada doctrine-in-the-making of letting the people decide on strictly legal or constitutional matters involving election cases is to weaken yet another political institution. (This undermining of institutions fits into the true Estrada legacy, but whether Estrada was a good chief executive or not is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to the legal and constitutional issue of a president’s reelection.) We need the Comelec, then, to qualify all candidates. That includes former presidents too.

The second division’s main argument for allowing Estrada to run again, therefore, represents an abdication on the part of the Comelec of its mandated responsibility to qualify all candidates for elective office. Whether because of Estrada’s celebrity, or because of the uniqueness of the case (nobody before Estrada had dared to run for reelection as president under the 1987 Constitution, although if the Supreme Court sustains the Comelec we can anticipate President Macapagal-Arroyo considering a reelection bid in 2016), or because the Comelec had earlier been embarrassed by reversals by the Supreme Court, the second division essentially followed the time-hallowed bureaucratic practice of passing the buck.

Its decision weighed two choices: an absolute ban on re-election, which is in fact how the Constitutional Commission of 1986 saw the issue and which explains why the restriction in the constitutional provision is on “any re-election”; or a limited ban, which is how Estrada’s lawyers argued the case and which explains their insistence on “The President” as the key phrase in the provision. But instead of deliberately choosing one or the other option, the second division opted to appeal to public opinion. It ruled, quoting existing jurisprudence, that “on political questions, this court may err but the sovereign people will not.”

Again, it all sounds reasonable, until we take a closer look. Why did the commissioners view Estrada’s disqualification case as a political question, and not as the legal and constitutional issue it really is? It comes down to backbone, or the lack of it.