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Renato Corona was impeached with haste and convicted without evidence of acts that did not constitute - in law, jurisprudence and political reason - impeachable offenses which must pose a grave threat to our liberties and system of government; such as over-ambitious and unscrupulous executives or over-zealous hanging judges.
You do not impeach for even the grossest inaccuracies in SALNs. Instead you level a charge of unexplained wealth. Justices do not enjoy immunity from suit during tenure. That would have forced him to recuse himself from his case if it got to the Court, and perhaps from the Court itself because it has supervision over trial judges.
It is not true that the Corona impeachment is water under the bridge. The life of the law is not a polluted river but justice. An injustice that strikes at the heart of democratic government, the separation of powers, and the very nature of the judicial power - even against one whose personality we dislike - makes a tear in the fabric of justice that compromises its ability to sift through innocence and catch true guilt.
We now have a new Chief Justice. Live with her. I cannot understand the headline, "Give Sereno a Chance". Excuse me, she doesn't need a chance. She is not in a popularity contest. So long as she commits no impeachable offense, she is, by the Constitution, irremovably there for three presidential terms.
It is said that she has biases. Well I hope so. She has to have a judicial philosophy but a few units of economics do not give her that. Posner's economic theory of law is not about economics but the use of economic reasoning (not economic considerations) to make judicial decisions. We will know from her decisions what that philosophy is. I have heard good things about the soundness even elegance of her decisions.
The Palace protests too much by insisting that she is independent. But that is for her to say and for us to see. The Palace says anyway she has only one vote. Why, did Corona have 15?
Historically, Presidents pick Justices and Chief Justices for their partiality to them. When Roosevelt tried to pack the Court, his Democratic majorities in both houses told him to wait for death to open up vacancies in the Court. He did and FDR's legacy of a liberal Court lasted until Reagan and Bush restocked the Court with conservatives. (But, as Chief Justice Roberts showed, circumspect conservatives.)
There is talk that Sereno's psychological test results shows her unfitness but that is just talk. I took the test myself. I shudder to think what the result was. I missed nomination by a hair. I wasn't wanted and my locked-in supporters had a back door.
At any rate, psychological condition is not a ground for impeachment. The first American impeachment was against Justice Samuel Chase, a genuine lunatic who hanged Republicans from gibbets to advance his Federalist Party. Still, Jefferson's completely Republican Senate would not convict on the ground that the damage to the separation of powers would be irreparable.
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