"We can look forward to three more years of a powerful and popular Duterte presidency."
"We can look forward to three more years of a powerful and popular Duterte presidency."
Still more good news this week for the administration from Social Weather Stations, which announced that overall satisfaction with the President as of first quarter this year had improved to an “Excellent” +72 from a “Very good” +66 in the previous quarter. It is the highest score ever achieved by any president since SWS first started tracking net satisfaction 30 years ago under President Cory.
At least among the broadsheets I subscribe to, only this paper headlined the SWS survey, last Sunday. The yellow rag Inquirer buried the story in its inside pages with not even a story head on the front page. Clearly they don’t want to draw too much attention to this latest broadside against the fast-sinking ship of the Otso sa Nitso crew.
It only promises to get worse for that motley crew. The credit rating agency S&P just upgraded Philippine sovereign debt to “BBB+”, only one notch away from breaking into the sterling “A” league tables, which our country has never achieved. Credit for this must also be shared with previous administrations, starting with former President Arroyo who managed to reverse the downward slide of our ratings on her watch.
Together with the upgrade story, this week’s news will again be dominated by breaking political endorsements from this or that non-political grouping. If and when it comes out, the INC statement is likely to echo the support given to administration candidates by its Catholic rival El Shaddai. Mike Velarde is no bishop, of course, but his break toward Duterte signals that there is no “one true solid Catholic” [and yellow] vote.
Providentially, the absence of a “Catholic vote” may well preserve the Church’s prestige from the ignominy of an electoral rout of Otso sa Nitso. Filipinos who’ve been Christians for centuries—most of them under the heavy hand of Catholic Spanish colonizers—are quite aware of the distinction between a transcendental and a temporal Church.
They know that the Jesus they worship did not lend His endorsement to any politicians—not the Sanhedrin (who accused Him), not the Roman procurator (who crucified Him), not even the Jewish revolutionaries (one of whom went free as the price of His execution). The business of politicians (whether of the cursing variety or not) is ultimately only of this world, and so it will always fall short of the only prize that Jesus ever really wanted: the saving of souls.
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However, even at this distance from the heavenly realm, there is still much that is worth doing for the saving of bodies (not souls).
This week is the final week of an oddly unexciting campaign. Given the likelihood of a virtual rout of the opposition next Monday (with perhaps only Bam Aquino surviving the landslide), we can look forward to three more years of a powerful and popular Duterte presidency.
Barring accidents or “zero dark thirty” mischief, the only exception to this scenario would be the President himself stepping down earlier. It’s a desire that I wouldn’t begrudge a 72-year-old man with health issues. Unfortunately for his supporters, stepping down seems to be something he really does want to do, as he’s said again and again during his advocacy of federalist Charter change.
In the first draft of the new “Bayanihan Constitution” proposed by his hand-picked consultative committee (Con-Com), Duterte was explicitly excluded from running again in 2022. But after seeing the draft, the President wanted even more. He asked the Con-Com to add language in the second draft that would also exclude him from becoming the “transition president” of a transition administration that would lead the country upon approval of the new Charter until the holding of the 2022 elections.
This presidential preference should be taken seriously by both current and presumptive new members of the Senate, a body that has had no compunction about blocking Duterte on issues ranging from Charter change to the current budget.
With the expected anti-opposition landslide next Monday, the President may well have the three-fourths Senate majority he needs to approve a new Constitution via a “constituent assembly” or Con-Ass, together with the much more compliant House. He can then look forward to enjoying more time watching his favorite Netflix titles back in Davao.
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Then again, Duterte may not get that three-fourths—not if some of those self-appointed presidentiables who perennially pack the Senate decide that they want to block him yet again. If that happens, those spoilers should remember that it will only take a simple majority of the Senate—something that Duterte can more easily assemble—to endorse the creation of a “constitutional convention” or Con-con to rewrite the Charter.
Holding a Con-con would add at most a year to Charter change, still within Duterte’s balance in office. More importantly, it would totally exclude the senators (as well as the congressmen) from the Charter-writing process. Those Con-con delegates would then be free, for example, to do the following under a new federal set-up:
Adopt a unicameral parliament and abolish the Senate entirely. This is something Senegal has already done, just to “save money”. Considering the Ps 15-B new building that the senators voted for themselves, that sounds like a pretty good reason to send them all packing.
Maintain the Senate as a regionally elected body with much more limited and consultative powers, focused on advocating for their respective home regions. In the extreme case, they would no longer enjoy the power to originate new legislation themselves.
Ignore the fate of those senators who might be caught mid-term by a federal transition and thus be prevented from serving out their current terms in full. Why should they expect any sympathy from Con-con delegates who owe them nothing?
In the United States, the Senate has been the mechanism by which the 50 states continue to assert their original and residual sovereignties. In our country, the Senate was set up as a forum and training ground for elder statesmen deemed to be among the country’s best and brightest—the likes of Recto, Tanada, Diokno, Marcos.
Today no one would think of making the same claim about the current crop. It’s now up to the senators to protect their institutional prerogatives as best they can by working with—not against—a popular president who wants federalism, right now and not later.
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Today’s first reading (Acts 7: 51 – 8:1) recounts the death by stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. By asserting before the Jewish Sanhedrin that Jesus was above Moses, Stephen did in fact apostasize against Mosaic law. Among the instigators of the stoning was the young Jewish scholar Saul, who “was consenting to his execution”.
It was this same Saul, reborn as Paul, who would later substantially finish the task Stephen started, by laying the teaching foundations for a new Christian church in the non-Jewish world. Both Saul and Stephen, killer and victim, evangelized for a Jesus who made the audacious claim—following His miraculous multiplication of the loaves—that “I am the bread of life” for whoever comes to Him (John 6: 30-35).
Today ecumenism is more popular than evangelization, when even the highest Church leaders are saying that the multiplicity of religions is somehow “willed by God”. Today is a good time to reflect upon St. Paul and St. Stephen, who taught otherwise.
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