One district in Mindanao alone can stop the PI

Francisco Tatad

LONG before the current Charter change proposals created a firestorm, I wrote about the legitimate need for a Charter change. I had long believed that the presidential system had not worked well for us and that it was high time we shifted to a parliamentary system, the more responsible exercise of representative government.

I was, of course, assuming that there was a genuine desire on the part of our political class to rise above their self-interest and work to improve our imperfect and frequently dysfunctional system.

This proved to be wishful thinking. It was soon revealed that the House had been secretly mobilized to inflict a fraudulent revision of the Constitution through a “politician’s initiative” masquerading as a “people’s initiative” (PI) that would turn the bicameral Congress into a unicameral system. This would be achieved by making the two houses of Congress vote as one house, instead of separately, when amending or revising the Constitution.

In this way, the 24 members of the Senate would be effectively swallowed by the 316 House members instead of standing as the numerical equal of the larger chamber in a separate voting. This would be the political equivalent of the boa constrictor swallowing the elephant in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince.”

Serious allegations also surfaced, first without evidence, that individual voters were being paid to sign the petition in support of the questionable PI. It was also revealed that a self-appointed convenor of the PI, a certain Noel Oñate, had commissioned a P55-million-TV commercial to sell the merits of PI, without having to report the official sources of all the money that was used to pay for it. Oñate confessed to paying for half of the P55 million, without claiming that he belongs to the Forbes magazine’s listing of the nation’s billionaires.

In a regular election, the election law or the Commission on Elections (Comelec) says how much money candidates, political parties and their supporters could legally spend on a campaign. Here, no law says how much money the “people” may spend to convince themselves (also “the people”) of the merits of their cause.

The core issue is the proposed constitutional amendment they want the voters to approve. They want the two houses of Congress to vote jointly. instead of separately, when amending the Constitution. The other option is for the two Houses to vote separately, as they do in every instance of ordinary legislation, but this is not mentioned in the motion skewed in favor of “joint voting.” If the House wants to be completely fair, it should ask the voters to “define” their choice in their own words — whether to vote separately or to vote together; not simply to say yes or no to “joint voting.”

The obvious effort of some politicians to manipulate the process leaves us no choice but to oppose Charter change. Unless we first exclude those who want to ride on it, nothing good will come out of it. We have to wait for better times and better men. For this reason, we welcome the arrival of the new “Coalition against Charter Change” (CACC), as announced by its organizers. It is a much-needed response.

But we have to be realistic in our expectations. I do not see it stopping the PI from garnering the votes that the pork barrel and public works contracts from the House can buy. Unless the PI proponents stand down, and the proposed process is called off, the CACC cannot do much to nullify the plebiscite on the proposed amendment.

However, I do have a modest, truly modest, proposal.

If, after all the unavoidable debates, common sense, self-respect and everything else fail to bring back sanity into the public square, the CACC can use the same constitutional provision that the PI campaigners have used to launch PI. Under this provision, 12 percent of the nation’s registered voters may directly propose a constitutional amendment or revision, provided not a single legislative district is represented by less than 3 percent of the registered voters therein. Therefore, all that is needed is for less than 3 percent of the voters of one solitary district to endorse the PI in order for the entire exercise to fail.

With former president Rodrigo Duterte, Vice President Sara Duterte, Davao City 1st District Rep. Paolo Duterte and Davao City Mayor Sebastian Duterte all working together to defeat the PI, the CACC, the senators, and other opponents of the PI could concentrate their campaign in Mindanao. To provide the basic platform for their position, the opponents of PI could ask the Supreme Court to rule on the constitutional validity of the PI, in light of its latest ruling in a previous case which declared that a “people’s initiative” must truly come from the “people” rather than from other sources using the name of “the people.”

I cannot see the fraudulent PI surviving such a convergence of powerful forces. The political and constitutional mobilization of Mindanao against the PI should also render unnecessary former president Duterte’s call for its secession from the Republic of the Philippines.

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