04/02/2020 E-Library - Information At Your Fingertips: Printer Friendly The dissent’s view will lead to glaring absurdities. Allowing the dissent’s proposal that an appointment is complete merely upon the signing of an appointment paper and its transmittal, excluding the appointee’s acceptance from the appointment process, will lead to the absurdity that, in case of non-acceptance, the position is considered occupied and nobody else may be appointed to it. Moreover, an incumbent public official, appointed to another public office by the President, will automatically be deemed to occupy the new public office and to have automatically resigned from his first office upon transmittal of his appointment paper, even if he refuses to accept the new appointment. This will result in chaos in public service. Even worse, a President who is unhappy with an incumbent public official can simply appoint him to another public office, effectively removing him from his first office without due process. The mere transmittal of his appointment paper will remove the public official from office without due process and even without cause, in violation of the Constitution. The dissent’s proferred excuse (that the appointee is not alluded to in Section 15, Article VII) for its rejection of “acceptance by the appointee” as an integral part of the appointment process ignores the reason for the limitation of the President’s power to appoint, which is to prevent the outgoing President from continuing to rule the country indirectly after the end of his term. The 1986 Constitutional Commission installed a definite cut-off date as an objective and unbiased marker against which this once-in-every-six-years prohibition should be measured. The dissent’s assertion that appointment should be viewed in its narrow sense (and is not a process) only during the prohibited period is selective and time-based, and ignores well-settled jurisprudence. For purposes of complying with the time limit imposed by the appointment ban, the dissent’s position cuts short the appointment process to the signing of the appointment paper and its transmittal, excluding the receipt of the appointment paper and acceptance of the appointment by the appointee. The President exercises only one kind of appointing power. There is no need to differentiate the exercise of the President’s appointing power outside, just before, or during the appointment ban. The Constitution allows the President to exercise the power of appointment during the period not covered by the appointment ban, and disallows (subject to an exception) the President from exercising the power of appointment during the period covered by the appointment ban. The concurrence of all steps in the appointment process is admittedly required for appointments outside the appointment ban. There is no justification whatsoever to remove acceptance as a requirement in the appointment process for appointments just before the start of the appointment ban, or during the appointment ban in appointments falling within the exception. The existence of the appointment ban makes no difference in the power of the President to appoint; it is still the same power to appoint. In fact, considering the purpose of the appointment ban, the concurrence of all steps in the appointment process must be strictly applied on appointments made just before or during the appointment ban. In attempting to extricate itself from the obvious consequences of its selective application, the dissent glaringly contradicts itself: elibrary.judiciary.gov.ph/thebookshelf/showdocsfriendly/1/60717 13/75