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Friday, March 29, 2024

‘Sapientis est distinguere’

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It is the way of the wise man to distinguish.  We learned this at the University of Santo Tomas with the venerable Ariston Estrada in his justly authoritative pose impressing upon us the importance of distinctions.  I find that wise counsel tills these days, even after all my shifting allegiances to phenomenology, process philosophy, logical analysis and postmodernism.  It is not only helpful to distinguish.  It is necessary to distinguish, because the alternative is simplistic reduction—to ignore real differences and to construct indistinctness sine fundamento in re…without foundation in reality!  Just as splitting hairs is specious, refusing to recognize distinctions is not only logically problematic.  It can have disastrous social and political consequences.  Is that not why Muslim Filipinos have been fretting till this very day?

I have been paying close heed to the objections raised to the possible adoption of a federal configuration of sovereignty in the country.  Separation of powers will refer under a federal Republic not only to the separation between the Legislature, the Executive and the Judiciary—that we will have to rethink if we choose a parliamentary form of government, besides—but also to the separation of the powers of the component states (regions is most likely what they will be called) and the national government.  

It is feared, for one, that federalism will create enclaves of dynastic power and fiefdoms of families that already wield considerable power.  In the first place, the rule of dynasties in the Philippines is not “caused by” a federal form of government, nor is it even logical to correlate the two, for we have had dynasties for some time now.  The framers of the 1987 Constitution were well aware of this scourge to Philippine politics but incomprehensibly thought of leaving it to Congress to make the constitutional proscription operative—something that quite predictably never happened at all!  Then, there is the fact that many Filipinos align themselves with families in power, lieges for life —not only their own, but the lives of the successors of the local barons.   I am a foe of dynasties, of that all can be sure.  But I should point out that in one truly provocative scholarly work —a doctoral dissertation submitted to Oxford University—Professor Pak Nung Wong who has done intensive studies on the Philippines described dynasties as one form of decentralization and devolution of what would otherwise be centralized power.  My own commitment is to propose a self-executory provision in the draft constitution that will effectively bar dynasties.

And there has surfaced once more the fear that with a new Constitution, incumbents may in fact be making their way into term extensions.  That of course is a possibility, but once more, there is neither legal nor logical necessity to it.  The transitory provisions will have to be crafted with care, but the terms of office holders will certainly be restudied.  In a parliamentary system, for one, a Prime Minister can be in power for as long as Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher were—and that is not a matter of constitutional infirmity.  That is just the way of a democracy.  After all, we do not have a limitless pool of leader material in the country!

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Finally, there is the quite ludicrous suspicion that a federal system of government breeds a dictatorship.  Honestly, I would like to know how.  In fact, a well-thought out federal scheme is the anti-thesis to any concentration of power—whether in a rotting and decadent cesspool like Manila or in a person or a clique.  When governmental power is devolved in considerable measure to component states or regions, I do not really see how you can call that a prelude to autocracy.  

So the main fear and objections are, to my mind, neither consequent nor attendant to a federal form of government.  They are, furthermore, red flags to which such bodies as the Consultative Committee and, ultimately Congress, must be alerted so that the appropriate cautionary provisions might be clearly and without equivocation inscribed into the fundamental law of the land.

Some relations, taught Thomas Aquinas, are per se.  Others are per accidens.  So far, the objections against federalism to which I have paid close attention because of the frequency with which they are raised are of the second kind!

rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph

rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph

rannie_aquino@outlook.com

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