THE lawyer of Senator Grace Poe on Friday told losing senatorial candidate Rizalito David to move on since the Senate Electoral Tribunal’s decision had clearly established that she, an independent presidential candidate, is a natural-born Filipino citizen.
Voting 5-4, the nine-man tribunal junked Poe’s disqualification case over the issue on her citizenship filed by David.
David had insisted that Poe should be removed from the Senate as she failed to meet the requirement that she be natural-born Filipino citizen when she ran for senator in 2013.
Poe’s lawyer George Garcia said David now bore the burden proving the tribunal was wrong.
“Mr. David has been ill-advised for disparaging the SET decision. It was not a political decision but a clear-cut judgment based on prevailing jurisprudence,” Garcia said.
David said he will appeal the SET ruling to the Supreme Court as he expressed hope that it would be overturned.
But Garcia maintains that Poe is a natural-born citizen under the 1935 and 1986 Constitutions, and that the senator is presumed a natural-born Filipino because she did not have to do anything to acquire her status.
In the latest Pulse Asia survey on preferred presidential candidates for the May 2016 elections, Poe was way ahead of the other candidates and even led her closest rival, Vice President Jejomar Binay, by 15 percentage points.
Her running mate, Senator Francis Escudero, enjoyed a more comfortable of 43 percent.
Meanwhile, Escudero said he was disappointed with the Supreme Court justices who voted against Poe.
He noted that the position taken by Associate Justices Antonio Carpio, Teresita Leonardo de Castro and Arturo Brion was a clear form of discrimination against foundlings whom they regarded as not natural-born Filipino citizens and thus barred from running for national posts.
“They could have forgotten the basic principle of the law that says that ‘those who have less in life should always have more in law’,” Escudero said.
