The good and the bad
About half an hour in, the 2017 State of the Nation Address got ugly. For what must have been the first time in our history, gratuitous cusswords punctuated a presidential speech delivered before a joint session of Congress. It wasn’t merely the use of expletives like the pword; it was calling opponents SOBs and—something that shocked the different audiences following the occasion more than President Duterte’s casual acknowledgment that he had killed a man before—using masturbation to describe someone’s policy position. (The President jokingly asked the interpreters, in the middle of his remarks, not to translate the Bisaya term he had used.)
Among our political rites, the annual Sona is of paramount importance. The President is required by the Constitution to “address the Congress at the opening of its regular session” (which the founding document has determined to be the “fourth Monday of July”). By tradition, this official function, which usually includes the presence of members of the Supreme Court, too, as well as that of the diplomatic corps, offers a perspective on the legislative agenda of the administration, and a presentation of the assessment of the state of the nation that drives the agenda.
There was very little of that in the 2017 Sona. Judging from the President’s own emphasis, made during the official address, repeated during his unexpected visit to a group of protesters after his speech and then again during and at the end of an unusual same-day news conference, the biggest policy proposal was in fact a change in policy: An end to the peace negotiations with the Communist insurgents. He cited one cause in particular (and it is a reasonable one); How can he negotiate peace with the rebels, he asked, when the New People’s Army deliberately ambushed a convoy of the Presidential Security Guard, the elite military unit that protects the President himself?
On his way to making this legitimate point, the President touched on many topics, not all of them related to his legislative agenda. To get a better sense of the speech as a whole, let’s zero in on two issues he brought up, to contrasting effect.
In his prepared remarks, he called on “the critics against this fight” versus illegal drugs to “use the influence, moral authority and ascendancy of your organizations over your respective sectors to educate the people on the evils of illegal drugs instead of condemning the authorities and unjustly blaming [them] for every killing that bloodies this country.” But off-script, he condemned the Commission on Human Rights and threatened to abolish this constitutionally mandated agency. This is still a President who does not welcome criticism, especially on human rights grounds. He did say, in his speech: “But don’t get me wrong. I value human life the way I value mine.” But later, in one of the many ad-libbed portions of the address, he expressed his preference to be shot in the back rather than “go beyond my term.” These contradictions raise the question about the value of the President’s own reference point.
But easily one of the highlights of his speech was his low-key, moving appeal to Supreme Court Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno to lift the temporary restraining order “that prevents the Department of Health from distributing subdermal implants, which will cause the wastage of P350 million worth of taxpayers’ money. I also note that since its issuance two years ago, this TRO has impaired the government’s ability to fully implement responsible family planning and methods and the [Reproductive Health] Law.”
The reason this was effective was the change of register to a more respectful but still powerfully argued line: “I will not attribute anything, ma’am, [to the] Supreme Court. Maybe I am at fault, so I am sorry, if I misquote or I did not have the complete facts. But [this] Congress [has] passed the Reproduction Law. It was already a law [that should be implemented], because we are really going into family planning. I am not for abortion. I am not for birth control. But certainly, I am for the giving of the freedom to a Filipino family [to choose] the size [of their family.]”
The President was not a petitioner arguing before the Supreme Court, but rather an advocate in the court of public opinion.