The court, in essence, held that the Congress has the right to obtain information from any source — even from officials of departments and agencies in the executive branch. “Unless the Congress possesses the right to obtain executive information, its power of oversight of administration in a system such as ours becomes a power devoid of most of its practical content, since it depends for its effectiveness solely upon information parceled out ex gratia by the executive.”

Invoking executive privilege threatens to make Congress doubly blind to the question of why the executive branch is not providing it with the information that it has requested, and “it severely frustrates the power of inquiry of Congress.”

The court further found it essential to limit to the president the power to invoke the privilege. “The privilege being an extraordinary power, it must be wielded only by the highest official in the executive hierarchy. In other words, the president may not authorize her subordinates to exercise such power.”

The penultimate paragraph in the decision is worth remembering:

“Resort to any means then by which officials of the executive branch could refuse to divulge information cannot be presumed valid. Otherwise, we shall not have merely nullified the power of our legislature to inquire into the operations of government, but we shall have given up something of much greater value — our right as a people to take part in government.”

The ruling PDP-Laban, being one of the petitioners in that case, should in the first place know about this.

A couple of thanks

A member of our family celebrated her birthday on Tuesday. She loves the cakes made by Lessand’s Cakes and Pastries, a made-to-order cake shop located in Las Piñas City.

To satisfy her yearning for the exclusive custard cakes baked by this shop, we ordered online through its Facebook page on Monday. To our surprise, there was a lead time ranging from three to seven days depending on the product ordered. Other than that, their baking load for that day was almost full. Well, we begged and begged, requesting that the other schedules be pushed to bake our order.

Fortunately, they found a way to service our order and have it delivered the following day. Thank you so much to Ms. Paula Benito for this accommodation. The next time you crave for a made-to-order custard cake, don’t forget Lessand’s Cakes and Pastries.

Also, I received my second dose of the Moderna vaccine on Wednesday. As usual, the health workers of Las Piñas City were all accommodating and helpful. It was one of the fastest government services that I have ever witnessed in my entire life — I went in and was out in just 16 minutes. I arrived at 10:53 in the morning in one of their mall-based health facilities and exited at 11:09 a.m.

My jab was administered by registered nurse Yvette Marie A. Lulu. Thank you so much for providing quality vaccination services to our countrymen.