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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Trusting Congress

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Would you leave your teenage daughter alone in a room with a member of Congress? If not, why would you leave to our legislators the job of revising our 30-year-old Constitution?

Senator Panfilo Lacson doesn’t think so, either. Reacting to plans by the Duterte administration to go the Congress-dominated constituent assembly route in order to make sweeping changes to the 1987 Constitution, Lacson was his usual terse self: “I don’t trust us.”

Lacson’s concerns have everything to do with Congress’ penchant for serving self-interest instead of the interest of the nation. And if the unfortunately named “ConAss” is the way to revise the basic law, who knows what self-interested insertions and deletions may take place?

ConAss, of course, is one of two ways to make wholesale revisions to the charter. The other way is what was used to craft the current Constitution —the Con-Con method, or the election of members of a constitutional convention who will deliberate and craft a new basic law full-time.

House Speaker Pantaleon “Bebot” Alvarez, who once advocated Con-Con because President Rodrigo Duterte was for it, has since decided to support ConAss, since that is what Duterte now wants. And if Alvarez’s waffling is not a reason why people should doubt Congress’ motives for doing anything, then I don’t know what is.

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Duterte’s change of mind supposedly has to do with economics, because holding a Con-Con election and the subsequent care and feeding of the elected delegates will cost several times more than simply letting Congress do the same job. The way Alvarez explained it to me in an interview is, Duterte figures that since congressmen and senators are already elected by the people, they’re already in perfect position to start working on revising the Charter—plus they already have the nice conference rooms and session halls where they can do it.

Like a good, servile House speaker, Alvarez’ job is to do what Duterte wants, the way he wants it done. And that goes the same for the Senate, apparently, where the new president, Duterte ally Senator Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel, has the difficult job of not only selling ConAss but also of convincing his colleagues that they could each merit only one vote in combination with the much-bigger House.

Yes, there’s that old issue, as well, of what the charter means by the entire Congress voting on constitutional revisions—whether that means a one-man-per-vote system or a one-vote-per-chamber basis. No wonder there’s a real need to change the damn thing.

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At this point, what seems plain is that if you want something like revising the Constitution (or anything else, for that matter) done, you don’t ask Congress to do it. Already, Congress seems embroiled in every possible side issue that making big revisions to the charter entails—except for the main reason why Duterte wants it done, in the first place.

And what Duterte really wants is to leave behind the centerpiece of his political reform agenda, which is to shift the form of government from unitary-presidential to federal-parliamentary. Way before we can get to the point where the people themselves will agree or not to this radical shift in the way we are governed, through a national referendum, we seem to have already lost focus because of the side issues raised by the members of Congress themselves.

If it is really true that Duterte is a man of action, he may have noticed that his plan of letting Congress craft a new constitution to save on a couple of billions is mistaken. And our legislators, even if Lacson’s fears are proven unfounded, would still be the wrong people for the job because they have other, equally important things to do— like passing urgent measures on freedom of information, emergency powers for traffic management and tax reform, to name just three.

Trust issues aside, I don’t believe that Congress will be able to do a good job of working as a charter-revising assembly simply because they already have too much on their plate. And I’m sure Duterte’s idea of changing the Constitution does not include coming up with a half-assed document, whichever way is chosen to draft it.

Of course, as Alvarez and other supporters of Duterte have pointed out, there is little danger in that happening because it will still be the people who will approve the changes in a referendum, as the charter itself provides. But wouldn’t it be a lot more efficient to let the people decide on changes that have been vetted and approved by experts on constitutional law, governance and economics instead of letting congressmen muddle their way through to a new charter that would have a greater chance of not getting the people’s support?

Perhaps this is why Noynoy Aquino never even considered changing the Constitution. Like online relationships, the job of making revisions to the charter often gets too complicated.

When I think of how changing the Constitution under the new administration is falling into the same traps that prevented it from happening in governments past, I remember how Duterte once called for the abolition of Congress itself. Now there’s an idea I could really get behind. 

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