When the story of the rise and fall of our present Fifth Republic gets to be written, one of its most interesting chapters will be how the Supreme Court ended up the most powerful branch of government, subverting the supposed separation of powers we assume is the hallmark of republics such as ours.

After the 1986 revolution, a consensus emerged during the drafting of the 1987 Constitution that the republic it established should have three fundamental characteristics. First, it should channel people power into the institutions created by the Constitution. Second, it should make accountability more accessible and limit the urge of the executive to aggrandize itself. Third, it would establish an activist judiciary to uphold rights.

Channeling people power into institutions failed: people’s initiative to propose laws or amendments to the Constitution became impossible. Making accountability more accessible by making impeachment a complaint that could be filed by ordinary citizens (though requiring a lawmaker’s endorsement), and lowering the numbers needed to impeach an official, has become more complex, more difficult, and more legalistic.

As for instituting an activist judiciary, it succeeded, but with results that were impossible for the framers of the Constitution to imagine: using the innovation of a quo warranto proceeding to undertake the elimination of a high official without recourse to impeachment, being just one case in point. The other being taking its being stung by threats of impeachment, to judicialize impeachment, distorting it into a politically unrecognizable simulation of judicial proceedings, something impeachments were never intended to be.

As a member of the Constitutional Commission of 1987, former Chief Justice Roberto Concepcion tried to make amends for the past. In 1973, he resigned days ahead of his scheduled retirement out of disgust or a broken heart (take your pick) over the court’s collective cowardice in the face of then President Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s threat to abolish the court by proclaiming a revolutionary government, if they insisted on reviewing his proclamation of martial law. In 1987, he proposed a cure: to compensate for the weaknesses of men, by strengthening the powers of the institution.

Arguing that the court in his time had used the political question doctrine as a cowardly escape hatch, he proposed asserting the court’s duty to rein in occasions of grave abuse of discretion. He believed an explicit constitutional mandate was required to give future justices what his cadre of justices had lacked–a spine stiff enough to check the abuses of other branches of government.

Skarlit C. Labastilla has characterized the result as “a mutant strain of judicial power.” This means, “By giving electorally unaccountable judges license, written in constitutional ink, to enter the political thicket as a matter of obligation, the Constitution, wittingly or not, redefined Philippine constitutional democracy as we know it.” A layman, giving Concepcion and the framers the benefit of the doubt (and members of the high court since, too) might call this a demonstration of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

At its heart—Concepcion’s folly, one might less charitably put it—was to imagine that the justices of tomorrow would be of Concepcion’s caliber. If only they might be more like him and less like them, one can imagine the thinking going; then all would be well. The Constitution itself attempted this by taking the vetting of judges out of the hands of politicians, and placing it instead, in the hands of the experts: better us, than them. So lawyers’ associations—whether as academics or as a guild—would do most of the vetting, presenting the politicians with a limited list.

In his later years, another lawyer-framer of the Constitution changed his mind, saying the Judicial and Bar Council (JBC) had proven its shortcomings and it might be better to revert to the pre-martial law system of having Congress’ Commission on Elections do the vetting. The JBC was, in hindsight, too much of an Old Boy’s Club, figuratively speaking.

Writing in 2010, Labastilla was kind to the high court: “Thus far, the Supreme Court, in using this power, has been sparing in its application but unfailing in its exercise. The narrowness of its scope and political sensitivity of its use [and] the disciplined use of this special power contributes in no small way to the stable functioning of Philippine constitutional democracy.” But what of the high court since? It has become bolder and bolder, some of its critics arguing, motivated by attempts to hold its members to account. It’s not just for the military that the question of “who will guard the guardians?” is important.