A revolutionary challenge

UNLESS we were inexplicably mistaken for misreading the events, there is a revolutionary ferment that obliges us to respond. The sooner, the better. Given the administration's enormous political capital, which has remained unused, its apparent inability to adequately address problems of governance has provoked an urgent call for change — revolutionary change.Absent a clear succession mechanism to take over when the government fails, there is a rising call for a transitional revolutionary government (TRG).This is where we seem to be headed. Some position papers have recently surfaced from certain military and national security sources, pointing out a leadership vacuum at the top and proposing precisely how it can be filled. One paper that recently came to my attention suggests a TRG is needed to do the job. The paper contains some specific proposals.The first proposal is a "regime change." This is to be achieved "extra-constitutionally but peacefully," the paper says, without any elaborate explanation. The current effort to remove the vice president by impeachment does not quite fit the bill; the proposed "regime change" will have to involve the president. It will have to replicate the effort of the military generals under US guidance in 1986 to oust President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. after winning the February 1987 snap presidential elections, throw him into exile in Hawaii and replace him with Mrs. Cory Aquino as revolutionary president.Marcos Jr. has done nothing to deserve this, but some regime-change proponents believe he has failed to use the vast opportunities and resources at his command. The next phase in this proposed scenario, according to the paper, is a "transition period" during which the "revolutionary government" will have to carefully plot its course leading to the normalization of the constitutional order. This has to be a deliberate and well-studied phase, rather than a simple repeat of what happened during Cory Aquino's short-lived revolutionary period of a few months.Under Cory Aquino, the 1973 "Marcos Constitution" was abolished, temporarily replaced at first by the so-called Freedom Constitution, and finally by the 1987 Constitution, hastily drafted by 48 appointed members of Aquino's "constitutional commission" (ConCom). Many critics blame some of the failings of the Cory administration on this decision to return to political "normalcy" before the time was up. These include egregious errors embedded in the Constitution. Two examples will suffice.During the ConCom deliberations on the new Constitution, the initial decision was to shift to a parliamentary government. A full-fledged parliamentary government, not like Marcos Sr.'s quasi-parliamentary government, controlled by the president/prime minister. But as the ConCom raced toward the completion of its draft, Cory Aquino realized that in such a government, her vice president, Salvador "Doy" Laurel, could become the prime minister while she would be reduced to being a mere ceremonial president, a figurehead.By this time, she already had a falling-out with Laurel, so she asked the delegates to shift back to presidential government with a bicameral Congress. The motion won by one vote, but one regrettable consequence that became clear only much later was that the delegates failed to make clear if the two houses of Congress would vote separately or together when proposing constitutional amendments. This error became crystal clear when the House proposed a constitutional shift to parliamentary government through people's initiative, in which the bicameral Congress would vote as one, instead of as two separate houses. This would have reduced the 24-strong Senate into a mere fraction of the 316-strong House and effectively abolished it as the upper chamber of Congress. The Senate passed a unanimous resolution denouncing the House initiative, and this ended the long parliamentary relationship between the two chambers.An equally fatal error allowed Cory and Doy to remain in office for the next six years after the lapse of their revolutionary period, without sufficient constitutional basis. Under the transitory provisions of the Constitution, "The six-year term of the incumbent president and vice president elected in the Feb. 7, 1987 election is, for purposes of synchronization of elections, hereby extended to noon of June 30, 1992. The first regular elections for the president and vice president under this Constitution shall be held on the second Monday of May 1992."Now, the only president and vice president elected in the Feb. 7, 1987 elections, as proclaimed by the presidential electoral commission, were Marcos and Arturo Tolentino. But this provision was misapplied to Cory and Doy, who were never elected; they merely protested the results and were installed by the military as "revolutionary president and vice president." However, no interested party ever questioned this misreading of the Constitution.The TRG, according to the paper at hand, will have to define the route and phases leading to political normalcy after the revolutionary period. Proposed reforms should include a new Constitution written by the people through their elected representatives, a new political and electoral system free from the corruption of the big political powers and the corporate elite, and a reformed political and economic class free from the clutches of the political dynasties. The values of government should embody the best in the character and soul of the Filipinos.All this, of course, will depend on how the various political, economic, social and human institutions respond to the revolutionary ferment that we now see on the [email protected]