A State of Panic

from Quezon.ph A proclamation of a state of national emergency is nothing less, and nothing more, than the a proclamation of a state of mind, Rep. Teodoro Locsin, Jr. told me as we marched down Ayala Avenue towards a Ninoy Aquino monument guarded from the people by phalanxes of policemen on the 20th anniversary of People Power. I asked him what he meant. He replied that a presidential proclamation is a public expression of a president’s thinking, with a catalog of facts the president claims justifies that state of mind. “For this reason,” he explained, “it is beyond judicial review and dispute.” Why so, I asked. “Because we have the precedent of the Supreme Court when Marcos suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus and later imposed martial law,” he said. “The Supreme Court said it is not a determiner of facts. Neither can it rule on a president’s state of mind.” For this reason, when the Supreme Court upheld President Marcos’s suspension of the Writ in 1971, Locsin’s father furiously condemned it: eight months later, he became one of the top ten prisoners of the dictatorship. Unlike me, Locsin is not an oppositionist; but he likes to think clearly. And he clearly sees that relying on judicial relief is a stab in the dark. Tags: quezon, state of panic, doctormagnus