Any chance the Senate as a “judicial” body (with the senators donning their robes) will tackle the constitutionality of such an exemptive Resolution?

I was for an assertive Supreme Court during the Marcos regime but the Court virtually abnegated its duty to check Marcos’ abuse of executive powers using for the most part the political question doctrine as the convenient excuse. What has happened was not a case of judicial self-restraint at all but plain judicial cowardice. Because of this unfortunate experience in constitutional history, CJ Concepcion has proposed the adoption of the so-called expanded certiorari power of the Court to make it its duty to review abuse of governmental powers. So, if judicial review is the rule and political question doctrine is the exception to the rule, the so-called expanded certiorari jurisdiction is just the exception to the exception. It was not meant to be a grant of expanded power but a constitutional imposition of a duty. But then the Court has not looked at it that way and begun to rely on it to shift the balance of constitutional powers in its favor (as shown in the cases cited in the main entry).

The Court has shown that it can rule by TRO in a similar vein that Marcos ruled by presidential decrees. As the only department in the tripartite system whose members are not subject to the political process of election, removal by impeachment becomes the only remedy to check the Court or its members.

Now, if the judiciary succeeds in eviscerating the impeachment power of Congress, how else can it be made accountable for abuse of judicial powers? A rebalancing of powers by way of impeachment is therefore a step in the right direction.

the impeachment of corona for being part of a collegial body that perverts the law, does not change the picture that the SC was the final arbiter of what the law is, but that does not bind congress if it says otherwise.

I have had the chance to analyze the Francisco decision before. Here’s what in part I have written relative to your question:
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What looms ahead is the disturbing prospect of a growing, expanding and dominating High Tribunal whose members could now hold office during “good (or bad) behavior until they reach the age of seventy or become incapacitated” without fear of being removed by impeachment.

The power of impeachment, which the Filipino people has wisely delegated to Congress, is now liable, the Supreme Court suggests, to the so-called expanded certiorari jurisdiction of the Supreme Court “to determine whether or not there has been a grave abuse of discretion amounting to lack or excess of jurisdiction” on the part of Congress (or any branch or instrumentality of the Government for that matter); and the power of the Court or those of its members to make such determination, supposedly pursuant to a newly appended paragraph of the Constitution (Article VIII, Section 1, paragraph 2), are subject only to their own sense of self-limitation.

The novel (but, on its face, exceedingly awesome) constitutional provision which also defines judicial power, states:

Judicial power includes the duty of the courts of justice to settle actual controversies involving rights which are legally demandable and enforceable, and to determine whether or not there has been a grave abuse of discretion amounting to lack or excess of jurisdiction on the part of any branch or instrumentality of the Government. (Article VIII, Section 1, paragraph 2 of the Constitution) (Italics mine).

Very early on, the scope of what is considered as awesome and delicate but vastly unsaid powers of the supreme Judges was defended by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist, No. 78, during the campaign for ratification of the US Constitution, by arguing that “the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them” unlike the executive who has the “sword” and the legislature the “purse.” According to Hamilton, “The interpretation of the laws is the proper and peculiar province of the courts” which is “so arduous a duty.” The defense was characteristically Hamiltonian. He was countermajoritarian and during the constitutional convention, delegate Hamilton was quite straightforward about his preference for a constitutional aristocracy, if not monarchy. Luckily for the Americans, he convinced no one but himself.

The inevitable watershed in Constitutional Law, which was Chief Justice Marshall’s opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803)—in turn the progenitor of what was pronounced by our own Justice Jose P. Laurel in the leading Philippine case of Angara v. Electoral Commission (1936)—was borrowed from the above arguments of Hamilton whose idea of the emerging constitutional democracy in America had not been shaped as then by actual experience. Consequently, it did not presage the decision of the US Supreme Court 50 years thereafter in Dred Scott v. Stanford (1857) to the effect that black people were not US citizens, heightening the political tensions that attended the American Civil War and thereupon costing more American lives than World War II, or in Roe v. Wade (1973), which established a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy (as well as necessarily tens of millions of potential lives—and sure enough, the counting is still on even at this very moment).

Among the first to fear “judicial despotism” was Abraham Lincoln, arguably one of America’s greatest presidents. During his inaugural address in 1861, Lincoln, assailing Dred Scott, said: “ . . . if the policy of the government upon vital questions, affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by the decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers . . .. ”

In the wake of the constitutional crisis generated by the impeachment of Chief Justice Hilario Davide, Jr., it would be quite apropos to mull over seriously the Lincolnian angst as this seemingly boundless authority of the Philippine Supreme Court it found for itself was openly brandished—although not relied upon to settle the crux of the matter—in the recently decided Francisco, Jr. v. House of Representatives (November 10, 2003) to dispose of the petitions and bar the impeachment of the Chief Justice. This would mean, I suppose, that even where earnest and commendable efforts are being urged for all concerned to end the crisis, to reconcile and move on, the far-reaching implications of what was pronounced in the decision should not be allowed to go unnoticed even if the actual controversy that brought the matter before the Court is “already over and done with,” and then laid quietly to rest as the definitive future course of Filipino constitutionalism. Instead, opportunity for continuing exchange and examination as regards the arguments advanced, the reasoning relied upon, or the philosophy promoted should be encouraged as part of the country’s on-going catharsis, political or otherwise.

For instance, the Francisco ruling seeks to reaffirm the concurring and dissenting opinion of Justice Reynato S. Puno in Arroyo v. de Venecia (1997) that the newly construed power of the Court is drawn from the sponsorship speech of the proponent of the afore-quoted paragraph 2, Section 1, Article VIII of the Constitution, the former Chief Justice Roberto Concepcion. This proposition must be revisited.

As part of the dialogue being urged here, I wish to state that I have always been an admirer of Chief Justice Roberto Concepcion. I believe he was, and still is, the most eminent Chief Justice the country has ever produced. It was then a privilege of the highest plane to be one of his students in Constitutional Law in my senior year in law during which the “the Chief,” the appellation of respect we fondly gave him, patiently fine-tuned our knowledge of the law as had been laid to us during freshman year in equally grand style by another Constitutional Law scholar, Enrique Fernando, who himself became Supreme Court Chief Justice.

In a sense, our class was fortunate to be privy to some of the Chief’s misgivings with his brethren in robe who participated in the disposition of the martial law cases. He shared with us his estimation that the Marcos regime would have been aborted if only the Philippine Supreme Court were unanimous against the impending dictatorship (just as the US Supreme Court was unanimous against Nixon, forcing for the first time a US president to resign from office). Often there’s this sense of a rare opportunity missed, or trifled with, whenever evidently we understood him to regard the Constitution as an instrument of the Rule of Law, while he saw some of his brethren treating it as nothing more than a political document liable to the compromises among political leaders, partisans, and supposed judicial statesmen. During the entire course, the Chief pounded on his students that “the essence of a constitution is LIMITATION” (Emphasis his). This brief but memorable encounter with a true champion of the Rule of Law tells me that it is unfair to attribute to him in any way the supposed expansion of authority of the Court by virtue of his proposal that is now paragraph 2, Section 1, Article VIII of the 1987 Constitution.

Thus, when former Chief Justice Concepcion as Constitutional Commissioner explained that by his proposal it “means that the courts cannot hereafter evade the duty to settle matters of this nature, by claiming that such matters constitute a political question”(Italics mine), I do think he meant to address it very clearly to his errant brethren who evaded their duty by taking refuge under the political question doctrine to validate Marcos rule; in that sense, this novel provision unmistakably rather than as a grant of “expanded,” “upgraded,” and “elongated” authority must be considered as just another limitation to the exercise of judicial power. It has to be so because a regime of constitutionalism is nothing less than one of a restrained and limited government, which is precisely the cognitive meaning of the constitutional instruction in the new provision as it defines judicial power as “(including) the duty of the courts of justice . . . to determine whether or not there has been a grave abuse of discretion amounting to lack or excess of jurisdiction on the part of any branch or instrumentality of the Government,” thereby prescribing a limitation to the theretofore externally unchecked judicial discretion—as well as indiscretion. This provision, contrary to the Court’s position, speaks not of power and control but of service and accountability.

To avoid the misplaced assumption of judicial supremacy as a necessary adjunct to the supreme character of the Constitution, which—when placed in the wrong hands—potentially could lead to the pitfall of judicial despotism, this so-styled expanded certiorari jurisdiction under the aforementioned provision of the Constitution must perforce be regarded as subordinate to the long-standing fundamental principle of coequality among the three branches of the government that presupposes reciprocal limitations. It is not enough indeed to pay mere lip service to such a constitutional value as the Court did in Francisco, for, without it being so engrained in the nation’s psyche, it would be too tempting for men and women to treat the Constitution as merely marking out the skeletal form of the government but they will flesh it out as they please.

It goes without further elaboration that if the Supreme Court in Francisco correctly read this time the new provision Chief Justice Concepcion had proposed, it would have been easier for the Court to uphold the republican principle and respect the interpretation of the House of Representatives—under the doctrine of “coordinate construction” whereby the people’s elected representatives have both the authority and competence to engage in constitutional interpretation—of the pivotal “initiate” in the challenged Sections 16 and 17 of Rule V of the House Impeachment Rules. Unfortunately, the Court unnecessarily took up what it supposes as its “activist” role and declared the interpretation of the House unconstitutional.
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You can access the full entry here.