CHIEF Justice Maria Lourdes should consider quitting her post as a New Year’s resolution after her public satisfaction plunged to another record, a critic said Sunday.
Lawyer Lorenzo Gadon, who filed an impeachment complaint against Sereno in the House of Representatives, said the Filipino people had witnessed only half of the pieces of evidence in the hearings being conducted by the House committee on justice but they were already convinced about her guilt.
“Public service is a public trust,” Gadon said. “And if a public servant, especially someone who claims to have integrity, is no longer trusted by the people, then it’s time to go if she even has delicadeza.”
Gadon has repeatedly called for Sereno’s resignation supposedly to save the judiciary from further damage as the impeachment case allegedly has shown the division among the high court justices.
But Sereno has also repeatedly rejected the call and vowed to fight her impeachment up to the end.
Gadon said the +6 net satisfactory rating obtained by the Chief Justice in the latest Social Weather Station survey-the lowest among the five top government officials”•only showed that the public was convinced by the allegations against her.
“CJ Sereno’s poll survey performance indicates only an incontrovertible truth: she has lost a huge amount of public trust. Yet we’re not even half-way through with our presentation of evidence,” Gadon said.
He said he expected the ratings of Sereno to plunge further this year as “we continue to reveal the truth [in the charges] in this impeachment process.”
Gadon said the lack of public support for Sereno as proven by the SWS survey no longer came as a surprise.
“She could not even get the support of judiciary personnel, which clearly and unequivocally show that her trust rating even in her own backyard has plunged miserably,” Gadon said.
He assailed Sereno’s camp for trying to downplay the survey rating by claiming that the impeachment process had not affected her as her rating remained “neutral.”
“The Sereno camp’s preposterous reading of the recent SWS poll surveys demonstrates the alarming manner by which her impeachment defense is being plotted. They are deliberately misinterpreting the fact that her public satisfaction ratings plunged in all-time low since 2015,” Gadon said.
“Such lamentable face-saving scheme done through the media shows how little they regard the intelligence of Filipinos. They really think they could still fool our people.”