Waste-making haste
January 22nd, 2003
A constitution is so fundamental to a country’s self-awareness, so critical to the goals it has set for itself and the means it has adopted to attain them, that it should be the product of rigorous analysis of a society’s needs at particular junctures of its history, as well as of the most thoughtful debate among the sectors and classes in a diverse society.
Although several nonpolitical groups are urging Charter changes, it is the politicians who have been most clearly identified with the current call for them. And yet partisan politics has been our ruin, because driven almost solely by self-interest—the kind of self-interest that can’t withstand either rational analysis or serious thought, and which can flourish only by ram-rodding self-interested changes, usually for the worst, through a politicized and mindless process.
Amending constitutions is a serious task that should therefore be free from the entanglements of politics and the waste-making perils of partisan haste. Unfortunately for the Philippines, neither condition has ever attended the country’s efforts at either drafting the fundamental law or amending it.
Politics of the deadly, partisan variety, and its faithful handmaiden haste (of the ningas kugon kind that has to hurry at the start because it fizzles out in the end), has nearly always attended Philippine efforts at Charter change or amendments in the last 30 years or so.
In 1971 politics cast long shadows over the Constitutional Convention to which some 200 delegates had been elected to amend, or draft a replacement to, the 1936 Constitution. The longest shadow was the open secret that Ferdinand Marcos wanted a third term beyond 1973, which the 1936 Constitution prohibited by limiting presidents to two four-year terms.
Marcos’s henchmen in the convention thus pushed hard for a deadline within which the convention’s work had to be completed, presented for ratification and finally approved by the people, and that was before the crucial date of 1973. The idea was for the new Constitution to take effect before that election year, and for Marcos to stand for election under its provisions.
Except that the convention did not turn out the way Marcos and company planned. Seeing through the scheme, the anti-Marcos wing of the convention made Marcos an issue, and argued for some kind of transitional provision to bar him from running in 1973. A groundswell of public opinion against Marcos’s running again in effect forced Marcos to fall back on the declaration of martial law to keep himself in power—which did away with elections entirely, and made Marcos President, it seemed, for life.
In 1986 the haste was less politically motivated and more understandable. The country was in need of a new beginning, and needed that quickly. It required the rejection of the Marcos, or 1973, Constitution, which the delegates to the 1971 Convention had signed, some of them under duress (several were in detention), during the first months of martial rule. As expected, Filipinos ratified the Marcos Constitution shortly after, and it came into effect in 1973.
That Constitution was in almost every way a copy of the 1936 Constitution, retaining, of course, the provisions that empowered the President of the Philippines, without any oversight by Congress, to put the country or any part of it under martial law. Identified with a regime that by 1986 was universally hated, that Constitution had to go, and it had to be replaced equally as quickly. In 1986 Corazon Aquino appointed members to a constitutional commission to draft a new Constitution.
The result was the 1987, or People Power, Constitution, which displays signs of the haste with which it was drafted, despite the best efforts of the majority of its drafters not only to do away with the provisions of the 1936 and 1973 constitutions that had made authoritarian rule so inevitable, but also to provide the country’s future leaders with a means to chart the country’s future.
However, it is not such provisions as that which identifies the armed forces as “the protector of the people”—and which ironically has been interpreted by the military as a blank check for coups and other interventions—that drives the call for changes.
Right now the focus is on the shift to a parliamentary government, as well as, from the advocates of decentralization, on federalism. There is of course talk that the disciples of headlong globalization also want the nationalist provisions of the Constitution scuttled, and land as well as mass media ownership by foreigners allowed, among others.
If indeed any change in the Constitution will include such proposals, it seems logical enough to demand and expect that there will be time enough for serious debate. If limited to only the proposals to shift to the parliamentary form and to adopt a federal system, careful debate among the widest representation from every sector of Philippine society appears equally necessary.
The danger, however, is that the serious process of amending—or even introducing wide-ranging changes in—the Constitution is being rushed, and in the context of opposition from 79 percent of the population.
The Social Weather Stations survey which said that many Filipinos oppose changes in the Constitution included the finding that 75 percent admitted that they knew little or nothing about the Constitution.
These findings validate the proposal by nongovernmental groups for an eight-year period for the education of the electorate in the present Constitution as well as the amendments being proposed, and for a Constitutional Convention to deliberate on amendments not earlier than 2010.
But these same findings have not led to the conclusion, among the disciples of either the House’s constituting itself into a constituent assembly, or those for electing delegates to a Constitutional Convention, that their respective deadlines for putting amendments in place—the first argue for 2004, the latter for 2010, since they want the Constitutional Convention delegates elected by 2004—are far too early, rather than too late.
House Speaker Jose de Venecia Jr., for one, says that the proposal for a Constitutional Convention would implement changes only by the 2010 presidential elections, which he says would be “too late for the Filipino people.” The fact is that “the Filipino people” de Venecia is talking about don’t want amendments at all, because they are clueless about the Constitution in the first place.
Who says, in the second place, that the implementation of any change has to be timed with presidential elections? The politicians, that’s who; and they think so because obviously, amendments to the Constitution are in their minds linked to the further flowering of their ambitions.
On the other hand, the proposal for a Constitutional Convention is equally suspect. Without a period of public education not only in the present Constitution but also in the crucial national issues that any amendments should address, the electorate will be clueless about what kind of persons qualify as delegates to a convention that will amend the Constitution.
If the delegates are elected as early as 2004, the election is likely to be, first, interpreted by the electorate as just another meaningless political exercise similar to electing municipal councilors; and second, exactly as the electorate expects in that it will mean the election of politician’s surrogates if not politicians themselves, with their inevitable focus on the narrowest interests (their own).
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, January 21, 2002)