Tuesday, October 17, 2006 Malilong: Gross misapplication By Frank Malilong Jr. The Other Side
Hey, listen to this: The coun-try’s gross domestic product is up 5.5 percent. The trade deficit has consistently declined during the last five years.
The stock market is on the second year of a “seven-year gain cycle.” Direct foreign investment during the first seven months of the year rose by 60 percent compared to the same period last year. In short, the Philippines is on its way to becoming the “next success story of Asia.”
If the country’s economic picture is as rosy as Ricardo Saludo, a top Malacañang official, painted it during a convention of local elective officials last week, why is this administration in such indecent haste to overhaul the Constitution?
Will constitutional revision work like a magic wand and make all the country’s problems disappear?
Will a new Constitution draw communist insurgents and Muslim separatists from the hills the way the pied piper drew the children of Hamelin into the cave?
Will a new form of government insulate the military from politics and cleanse it of adventurist tendencies?
Will a revised Constitution bring about more respect for, and a deeper acknowledgment that it is, a sacred document?
Will it increase production in the farms, promote a safer environment and rationalize the cost of living?
Will it eliminate cheating? Will it bring back overseas Filipino workers and reunite them with their families?
The answer, of course, is that it cannot by itself do any of these things. We have had at least three new Constitutions since the 70s and the communist and the Muslim rebellion is as serious a threat as ever; military intervention continues to hang like a sword of Damocles over our heads; we continue to live in grinding poverty; and the exodus of Filipino workers remains unabated.
Worst of all, we have never really learned to honor the Constitution.
Last week, a congressman from Mindanao was quoted as asking why we cannot just let the people’s initiative be and submit the proposed revision to the people in a plebiscite. The voice of the people is the voice of God, he thundered.
What a gross misapplication of an otherwise wise and sound constitutional principle. What he proposes to do cannot be done because the Constitution says so. If it were otherwise; if everything can be done by submitting it directly to the people, then we might as well abolish Congress. Cheaper pa.
No, I am not saying that we should not amend or even revise the Constitution.
No law is written on granite. But the change should not be capricious or whimsical. Its driving force must be nothing less than the purest motive. To use it to get even with an institution by abolishing it is as ignoble as can be.
And let’s do it in due time, manner and season even if it means dealing with an indifferent, if not hostile, Senate. It may be difficult under the circumstances but that is what the Constitution says.
