Filipinos have a saying for someone who arrives after the fight is over: "huli na, mali pa" — too late, and still gotten wrong. That describes our Supreme Court's habit with urgent petitions. The deeper irony: the Court exists precisely to weigh both facts and law, with the Constitution supreme among all laws — yet its own chronic delay raises a troubling question of whether the institution sworn to uphold that Constitution is, in practice, eroding it.
In Sanlakas v. Executive Secretary, in 2004, petitioners challenged Arroyo's "state of rebellion" declaration during the 2003 Oakwood mutiny. She lifted it before the Court ruled six months later — yet the justices proceeded anyway, invoking the doctrine that acts "capable of repetition yet evading review" must still be decided. Proof the Court can rule after the fact when it wants to.
In ABS-CBN Corporation v. National Telecommunications Commission, in 2020, when the NTC ordered the network off air, ABS-CBN sought a restraining order. But the Court sat for months while the broadcaster stayed dark. Congress killed the franchise renewal in July. By August, the Court dismissed the case as moot. Justice Leonen admitted separately that he would have ruled the shutdown constituted a grave abuse of discretion — the NTC having acted without prior notice or hearing — had the issue not become moot first.
In Pormento v. Estrada, in 2010, a petition to disqualify Estrada under the ban on presidential reelection sat through the entire 2010 campaign. He lost. Only then did the Court rule — moot, since he was never reelected. The constitutional question was never actually answered, and still is not.
The Anti-Terrorism Law petitions in 2020–2021, followed the same script: thirty-seven filings warned of due-process dangers weeks after signing, yet the Court took roughly a year and a half to decide, by which time arrests had already occurred under the challenged provisions.
In the Duterte impeachment in 2025, articles reached the Senate on February 5. The Court did not rule until July 25 — nearly six months of limbo — before voiding the complaint on a technicality, leaving accountability unresolved to this day.
The Dela Rosa case, still unfolding, follows the pattern closely. He sought protection from an anticipated ICC warrant in November 2025. The warrant came in May 2026. Only on May 20, after he had fled and resurfaced, did the Court rule — denying the TRO 9-5-1 while admitting the constitutional questions "are yet to be resolved." Once he reaches The Hague, expect ABS-CBN's script repeated: moot, nothing left to restrain.
Here is the pattern, named plainly. Article VIII, Section 15(1) directs the Supreme Court to decide all cases "within twenty-four months from date of submission." Article III, Section 16 guarantees every person "a speedy disposition of their cases" before all judicial bodies — the Supreme Court included. That legal verdict belongs to the bar.
But the institutional cost is plain: when the body meant to check every other branch routinely outlasts its own clock, what erodes is public trust — the sense that no citizen can rely on timely justice from the one court with no one above it to appeal to. This is an old failing, recurring, and it has a name and a face.
In 1973, Chief Justice Roberto Concepcion dissented alone against his own colleagues in Javellana v. Executive Secretary, refusing to bless the ratification of Marcos's 1973 Constitution despite documented irregularities in how it was supposedly approved. He was outvoted, six to four. The majority relied on the political question doctrine, ruling the matter beyond judicial reach, and the decision paved the way for fourteen years of dictatorship.
It was not the only such retreat. Months earlier, in Aquino v. Enrile, the same Court had waved through the mass warrantless detentions of Martial Law's early days, deferring to executive authority rather than testing it. Concepcion never forgot either failure. When democracy returned in 1986, President Corazon Aquino appointed him to the Constitutional Commission, where he chaired the committee on the judiciary.
There, the man who had once dissented alone wrote himself a remedy: the expanded definition of judicial power in Article VIII, Section 1, empowering courts to strike down any branch of government for grave abuse of discretion, closing the door his own Court had once hidden behind.
Nearly forty years later, legal scholars still ask, in peer-reviewed analysis, whether the Court has ever fully walked through the door Concepcion built for it. The mootness doctrine, used as it has across these six cases, risks becoming the modern face of the very doctrine Concepcion spent his final years trying to close — a fresh escape hatch built from old habits, dressed in different Latin.
David v. Macapagal-Arroyo, in 2006, even handed the Court its own way out of that habit: mootness must yield when the violation is grave, when public interest is paramount, or when the harm is "capable of repetition yet evading review." Sanlakas proves the Court knows how to use it. Concepcion's own clause proves the Court was built to use it too.
It has yet to do so, again and again.
Every delayed ruling tells power the same quiet thing: move fast enough, and the Constitution's own upholder will let you outrun it. That is not a technicality. It is a political fact with consequences — a highest court whose timing has, time and again, allowed whoever can outrun the docket to do so, while ordinary Filipinos wait for verdicts that arrive only after they no longer matter.
Concepcion's lonely dissent proves one justice can see the danger in time. Whether an entire Court can act on that same instinct, before the harm is done rather than after, remains this generation's unanswered question.
Until then, "huli na, mali pa" will remain more than a saying. It will remain the record — of a Court that has, so far, every constitutional tool it needs to be on time, and has not yet used it.•
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Dr. Darwin T. Rasul III is a political analyst, writing as a regular columnist of OpinYon. He has served as Expert-Consultant of European Union Germany, ARMM Cabinet Assistant Secretary (Asec.), Editor-in-Chief of ARMM Official Publication, and was a legislative researcher and then as consultant in the Senate of the Philippines. He is a book author.