Like Marcos, Trump should be told: ‘Time to cut and cut cleanly’
Like Marcos, Trump should be told: ‘Time to cut and cut cleanly’
November 7, 2020
By Atty. Romulo B. Macalintal
With fellow Republicans distancing away from US President Donald Trump’s claim of election fraud and his being cut-off the air by big TV networks for making such claim without any evidence, it is game over for him.
This brings to mind that eventful day in the 1986 Philippine People Power Revolution when former President Ferdinand Marcos desperately searched for ways to cling to his power, he was told by then Senator Paul Laxalt, a close friend to then US President Ronald Reagan that “It is time to cut and cut cleanly.”[1]
So it should be for Trump. Like Marcos, he should be told that it is all over and time for him “to cut and cut cleanly.”
For sure, even Trump’s majority Justices in the US Supreme Court will hearken to the people’s chant of “count every vote”, not only because it is the law, but the court knows that a different ruling will ignite a civil disobedience which the court would not want to be the cause thereof.
The problem is that US courts do not have precedents in cases involving ballots which Trump wants to be invalidated on his allegation that they are “illegal votes” without any evidence at all. If in many cases our courts referred to US precedents for decisions, perhaps, on this issue, the US courts may also refer to decisions of our Supreme Court on election cases.
For Trump’s petition to invalidate millions of alleged illegal votes is akin to a “petition to annul election results” resorted to by losers in Philippine election where they asked the court’s to, like Trump, invalidate the votes of their rivals, even without sufficient evidence to support such claim but merely in an apparent showing of unwillingness to accept defeat in good grace.
But before annulment of votes could be done, our Court ruled that “the strictest standards and procedures of law laid down by no less than Chief Justice Diosdado Peralta must be strictly observed, in that there must be “clear, convincing and strong evidence showing that the (candidate complained of) is the one responsible for the unlawful acts or induced and actually perpetuated the commission thereof.” [2] And this must be “judiciously exercised with utmost caution” so as not to disenfranchise innocent voters.
As it is, there appears no “clear and convincing evidence” that such alleged “illegal votes” exist nor that Biden was instrumental in the commission thereof, hence, the US courts, referring to Chief Justice Peralta’s sterling doctrine, may just simply dismiss the various petitions filed by Trump for being frivolous or, like a vagrant, have no visible means of legal and factual support.
The issue of voter fraud was easily debunked by a non-partisan institute in New York with its report that “it is more likely than an individual will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”[3]
Any ruling to the contrary will certainly be forBiden.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/25ef78113ad707b046226114a25c037d
[2] Abayon vs HRET, May 3, 2016, citing the Separate Opinion of Chief Justice Diosdado Peralta when he was still the Chairman of the HRET.
[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/11/4/us-elections-counting-ballots-is-not-fraud.
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