Extension

Only when the politicians began speaking about a possible term extension for President Duterte did we realize the effort to change the Constitution was still alive. It must have been a year since constitutional renovation was publicly discussed.

While a term extension for the President was discussed, the real agenda appears to be the cancellation of the 2019 elections. This effectively extends the terms of all sitting elected officials.

Our legislators are rarely shy about pursuing naked self-interest. This time, however, they have foisted extension of the presidential term as the lightning rod – possibly to soften public resistance to the extension of the terms of everybody else.

The Palace quickly clarified that President Duterte has no interest in extending his stay in office. The President, in fact, had said that he was willing to cut short his term to make way for a constitutional transition.

The President is being used as the battering ram to tear down the walls of term limits so that the incumbents in lesser posts could entrench themselves in power. This is unfair to Duterte.

It is obvious the President has grown weary about his job. He is never happier than when he is at home, in Davao, hanging out with his grandchildren.

Duterte did not hanker to be President and today performs his job as a matter of duty to the nation. He has clear goals and harbors no illusion about his physical limits. He would love nothing more than being honorably relieved of his responsibilities so that he can resume the simple life he led.

But his supposed allies would have nothing of that. They know that without Duterte as rallying point, they have nothing. The “super-majority” is a cynical alliance of opportunists. Without Duterte, these politicians would soon be at each other’s throats.

Changing the Constitution by means of converting the sitting Congress into a constituent assembly is probably the only feasible way to get the renovation we want. But there is an underside to that method. It empowers the incumbent politicians to write a charter that entrenches them in power. They are not about to legislate themselves to extinction.

This is why “federalism” and not a shift to a parliamentary form of government headlines the effort at Charter change. “Federalism” will entrench the sitting elites. A shift to a parliamentary form of government will alter the configuration of representation and make way for political parties to play a more decisive role in our politics.

For this reason, public interest in the process of constitutional renovation has waned. There is no groundswell for Charter change. A shift to federalism has become the exclusive agenda of the political aristocracy.

Only the PDP-Laban appears genuinely excited by the prospect of rewriting the Constitution by the force of the “super-majorities” they have in both chambers of the legislature.

BBL

There is another matter that has become intertwined with the process of rewriting the Constitution: the Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL).

There is no way the sort of “self-determination” imagined by the proponents of the BBL could be constitutional within the framework of the 1987 Constitution. The substantial autonomy imagined by the leaders of the MILF can be delivered only if the Charter is changed and federalism adopted.

But here lies the irony. If the Charter is changed and federalism delivered, every region gets the sort of autonomy that Filipino Muslims demand. The BBL becomes a redundancy. The political project of enacting a “basic law” for Muslim Filipinos will have to be junked.

If every region (or “estado”) get the same sort of determination Filipinos Muslims want for themselves, then even secession becomes redundant. Federalism kills the project of nationhood. We all basically secede from everybody else.

We in the metropolitan region should be happiest about the prospect of “federalism.” Should region 3, the NCR and Region 4 be consolidated into one “estado”, we will have a per capita income higher than Malaysia’s. The poorer regions can go to hell.

But that is not the outcome we want. This is the reason there is no groundswell for the federalism project.

We want to grow together as a nation and to be able to achieve that we need a strong unitary state.

Representation

If we really want to reform the way the nation is governed, the shift we need is from a presidential to a parliamentary system.

It is time to abolish the bicameral legislature. It is a costly and wasteful redundancy. We have a Senate whose members have more votes than the President even if they do not represent any clear constituency. We have a House of Representatives whose members come from gerrymandered districts tailored to perpetuate political clans.

The entire system of representation will have to be reconfigured. But if it is reconfigured, the sitting political aristocracy will be displaced. But if that political aristocracy is the same one redesigning the political order, this will never happen. There lies the political riddle of our times. In order to truly reform our governance, we need to extinguish the oligarchy that holds the state captive. But that will not happen if the terms of our “reform” are determined by the oligarchy itself.

The riddle of our times is like the Gordian knot. It can only be disentangled by a single and decisive blow of the sword. This is why there are those enamored by the idea of a “revolutionary government” rather than a predictable “constituent assembly.”