In her more than nine years as president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA) appointed almost all of the justices of the SC, but the High Court slapped down her United States-sponsored MOA at the signing, of which the American and Japanese ambassadors were present. The SC trashed it, nonetheless, as close
to treason.
Noynoy has promised a new deal, but it may well be the old deal, but with a new way to ram it through by threatening the SC with jurisdictional castration—the same SC that declared as illegal Budget Secretary Florencio B. Abad’s scheme of fast-track spending.
The threat of Charter change—if it just stays a threat—may persuade the SC to approve a restyled, but the same old, GMA MOA struck down earlier as nascent treason. The actual carrying out of Charter change will dismember our country and leave the High Tribunal with no choice but to accept the territorial loss as “amendedly” constitutional.
***
AT about 3 a.m., when the December 1989 coup was gaining ground, I wrote a short statement for Cory Aquino to read. It said: “To the rebels, I say this: You have two choices: surrender or die.” When she read it, she told me: “Are you serious? Our troops are falling back everywhere.”
I said, “Ma’am, it is not like we can say that.” She smirked at the idle threat I expected her to make. To be sure, by 3 a.m., I was well in touch with US intelligence for an American military intervention, though I understand that the defense attaché favored the rebel cause. I could not tell her yet; she disdained the mere notion of American intervention to save Philippine democracy, whose restoration the US had opposed. She wasn’t going to start depending on America to protect it.
Cory had a profound respect for the written and spoken word, which is to be used only to tell things as they are and never as we want to pretend they are. She never stooped to deceive, even for a good cause, like fooling the public to support her with an idle threat to armed public enemies numbering in the thousands. Words were sacred to her, for Hohn says, “In the beginning was the word,” and Ninoy said, “The Filipino is worth dying for,” and proved it. For her part, Cory added, “the Filipino is worth fighting for”—her exact words—when she took up the challenge of the dictator to face him in a snap election.
Philippine freedom does not deserve to be fought against by sacrificing democratic accountability for the sake of faster spending and destroying the separation and balance of the government’s powers. Quickies are not constitutional, which require the foreplay called due process.
Perhaps, Noynoy’s announcement that he is suddenly open to Charter change—to a second term—and to the jurisdictional castration of the SC if it rules against him again is just a ploy. Malou Tiquia explains that there is no time to pull off a change of such contentious nature and magnitude. But there is time to use the threat of it to whip up support for Noynoy’s unpopular candidate in 2016 and as a threat to scare the SC to reverse its decision on the Disbursement Acceleration Program and approve a Bangsamoro deal to amputate the republic, like what GMA’s unconstitutional MOA had attempted, but failed.
Teddy Locsin Jr. / Free fire