The Senate this week voted in favor of a resolution asking the Supreme Court to rule on whether or not the President needs Senate concurrence to abrogate a treaty.
The resolution, filed by Minority Leader Franklin Drilon, was passed by a majority of 12 senators, while seven administration allies abstained.
The impetus for the resolution was President Rodrigo Duterte’s threat in January to abrogate the country’s Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) with the United States, after the US canceled the visa of one of his allies, Senator Ronald dela Rosa, presumably over his role in the government’s bloody war on drugs when he was still national police chief.
Ignoring calls from the Senate to reconsider his decision, the President ordered Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. to send the US formal notice of the VFA’s termination on Feb. 11, setting in motion a countdown of 180 days until the agreement expires.
Throughout this process, the Palace and the President’s allies have insisted that he was acting well within his rights as the chief architect of foreign policy to terminate the agreement without going through the Senate, which had ratified the VFA in 1999.
A contrary view suggests that agreements that require Senate approval for ratification, by implication, also need the same for termination.
The Senate resolution would ask the Supreme Court, the final arbiter of the law, to settle this question once and for all.
Senate President Vicente Sotto III said the vote was not an affront to the President but rather “purely a question of law”—but it was clearly a rare show of legislative independence.
Those who voted for the resolution were Sotto; Senate President Pro-Tempore Ralph Recto; Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel Zubiri; Drilon; and Senators Francis Pangilinan, Risa Hontiveros, Panfilo Lacson, Joel Villanueva, Juan Edgardo Angara, Nancy Binay, Richard Gordon and Lito Lapid.
Seven administration allies, Senators Christopher Go, Dela Rosa, Aquilino Pimentel III, Imee Marcos, Ramon Revilla Jr., Francis Tolentino and Cynthia Villar, abstained.
Two senators, Manny Pacquiao and Pia Cayetano, were not allowed to cast their vote after both arrived late after the voting was held. Their votes, however, would not have changed the outcome.
Drilon later expressed disappointment that they could not get a unanimous vote on such a simple question—while Dela Rosa said it was sad that the majority bloc was unable to get the majority vote.
Sotto, for his part, said several of the administration allies—whom he did not name—abstained because they didn’t want to offend the President.
Pimentel and Marcos said they abstained due to "lack of information" on the resolution that would be filed before the Supreme Court, while Dela Rosa and Tolentino said there was no need to go to the Court to determine the Senate's role in the cancellation of treaties as the Constitution is "very clear" about it. Go said he abstained because "there are pending cases before the Supreme Court" on similar matters, while Villar and Revilla did not explain their abstentions.
The explanations were as unconvincing as their votes were timid.
How difficult, after all, would it be to obtain more information about the resolution from one of their colleagues? And if some of the President’s allies truly believed the Constitution was clear, why did they not vote “no,” instead of abstaining?
The senators who abstained for fear of offending the President shirked their responsibility as senators to serve the people in an independent branch of government. After all, they swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not any one person.
