Antonio C. Abaya - ConCon, not ConAss

Like many concerned Filipinos, I am not against ChaCha or Charter Change. Regular readers of this space know I have a long list of amendments that I would like to see in our Constitution, even if it means having a revolutionary government make those changes.

And just in case some middle-class types quake in their boots at the mere mention of the R word, let everyone be reminded that President Cory Aquino led a revolutionary government from February 1986 until a new Constitution was ratified in September 1987.

That's 19 months during which she ruled by decree, since the 1972 Constitution of Ferdinand Marcos had become inoperative. How and why President Aquino's revolutionary government failed to create anything revolutionary is another matter.

What I and many concerned Filipinos find objectionable is how the political and constitutional institutions are being corrupted and prostituted for the sole purpose of allowing President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to remain in power beyond 2010, as prime minister.

As far as I know, I was the first columnist to raise the alarm. In February 2005, her miniscule party, KAMPI (Kabalikat ng Malayang Pilipino), held a party conference in which its president then, current Secretary of the Interior and Local Government Ronaldo Puno, announced its plans to become the biggest political party by 2007.

Why such a tiny party nursed ambitions to become the biggest political party by 2007, three years before President Arroyo's non-extendable presidential term would end in 2010, set me thinking.

In my articles Prime Minister Gloria? (May 17, 2005) and GMA Forever (March 28, 2006) and subsequent articles – all archived in www.tapatt.org – I argued that Mrs. Arroyo was maneuvering through Kampi to amend the Constitution for a shift to a parliamentary system so that she can remain in power beyond 2010, as prime minister.

Sure enough, in the latter half of 2006 we saw two initiatives in this direction: a People's Initiative signatures campaign by the Sigaw ng Bangaw, led by a factotum of Speaker Jose de Venecia, which purportedly gathered the requisite x million signatures for a shift to parliamentary, but which mercifully was junked by the Supreme Court as "a gigantic fraud."

The other maneuver was shamelessly led by the persistent De Venecia who tried to convene the Lower House into a constituent assembly (ConAss) without the oppositionist Senate, to railroad a shift to parliamentary in the wee small hours of the breaking dawn. Mercifully, this maneuver was hooted down by public opinion.

In his pompously titled biography "Global Filipino: The Authorized Biography of Jose de Venecia Jr., the Visionary Five-Times Speaker of the House of Representatives of the Philippines," JdV is said to recall how he allegedly saved President Arroyo from being impeached. That may be true, but it makes him all the more a villain, for extending the shelf life of a putrefying government.

JdV's kilometrically-titled bio deserves an equally kilometric subtitle: "How I Saved GMA from Political Death in 2005 So That I Could Push for Parliamentary in 2006 and Become Interim Prime Minister in an Interim Parliament in 2007 until GMA Takes Over in 2010 as Permanent PM, Which Would Have Been My Last and Only Chance Before I Die to Become Head-of-Government of This God-Forsaken Country, Having Been Defeated Ignominiously by That Idiot Erap in the 1998 Presidential Elections, 39 to 17 Percent, But Now That I Have Been Kicked Out by GMA from My Own DogHouse, the Only Thing Left for Me to Do Is to Hire An Unknown American Writer to Sing Hosannas to Me."

The sordid relationship between De Venecia and Gloria Arroyo in the last three years accentuates the need to amend the Constitution so that both the People's Initiative and the Constituent Assembly are totally removed from our basic law since in the hands of unscrupulous and insatiable trapos, of whom we have legions, these are used only for selfish, ego-maniac purposes.

A Constitutional Convention, to which delegates are elected by congressional districts and from which relatives of incumbents are pointedly excluded, should be the only venue for Charter Change.

A Constituent Assembly, in which incumbent members of both Houses of Congress sit, is by its very composition self-serving. Its members will never do anything contrary to their self interests. On the contrary, they will do everything to protect and preserve their self-interests, including conniving with the incumbent President to prolong her stay in power, as prime minister, as long as they also remain in power, by. becoming automatic members of the resultant parliament.

For example, the 1987 Constitution called for the dismantling of political dynasties. Yet nothing has been done about this in the past 21 years, and nothing will be done about it in the next 21, because the political dynasties which dominate Congress will never do anything to weaken or loosen their stranglehold on political power.

The Constitution should also be amended to reduce the appointive powers of the President who, as exemplified by Gloria, would abuse those powers in appointing members of what are supposed to be independent bodies - such as the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals, the Office of the Ombudsman, the Commission on Elections, even the Chief-of-Staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines - to serve her personal agenda.

By appointing mostly those who are friendly or beholden to her, President Arroyo has diabolically built the legal and organizational infrastructure necessary for perpetuating herself in power beyond 2010 as prime minister.

Malacanang and President Arroyo herself have categorically stated that they are not interested in term extension. This was in reaction to a bill submitted in the Lower House that would extend the terms of the president down to congressmen and women by one year and postpone the 2010 elections to 2011.

This is only a decoy, meant to delude people into believing that she has no intention of staying in power beyond 2010. It does not rule out or stop current maneuvers to shift to parliamentary, led by Albay Gov. Joey Salceda and the Kampi-Lakas trapos in the Lower House, which would allow GMA to run for a seat in a putative parliament and thus be elected prime minister by the Kampi-Lakas majority. Nothing has changed since the Kampi party conference in February 2005, except that JdV has been discarded like a soiled sanitary napkin.

And then there is Sen. Nene Pimentel who wanted to build a monument to himself as the Father of a Federal Philippines. He also wanted to convene both Houses of Congress into a Constituent Assembly to shift from a unitary state to a federal union. And he wanted this to happen before the end of President Arroyo's term in 2010. Why? Obviously because his last term in the Senate also ends in 2010, after which his monument to himself could no longer materialize.

Despite my warnings to him (see my article Federal Fol-de-Rol of April 28, 2008 and subsequent articles on Federalism, all archived in www.tapatt.org) that he was building a Trojan Horse for President Arroyo to hide in and jump from once it was sneaked in through the ConAss, he insisted that only the federal agenda would be tabled for discussion. But, I argued, he was only the designated carpenter and he had no say whatsoever on who or what would be hiding in it. In other words, parliamentary would be sneaked in through his Federal Trojan Horse.

But, hopefully, he may have seen the light. In the latest (Nov. 30) of his endless stream of press releases, Sen. Pimentel warns "what (the allies of GMA in Congress) did to the impeachment case by using their numerical superiority, they would also do on the proposed extension of terms….it is a portent of things to come……"

Ngayon ka lang ba nakahalata, Nene?

By all means, let us have ChaCha. But only after 2010. And only through a Constitutional Convention. Even if it has to take a revolutionary government to do it, after everything else is co-opted and corrupted.

Reactions to tonyabaya@gmail.com. Other articles in www.tapatt.org and in www.acabaya.blogspot.com.

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