The worst injustice that can happen to a country is “failure of election”.
It is the much-dreaded political scenario that now engulfs and frightens the nervous hearts and minds of the Filipinos.
Such a national-level and massive failure of election is possible if the automated election system which is now being rushed by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) malfunctions, both for technical and malicious reasons, during the general elections in May this year.
It is the subject of a recent self-explanatory editorial of the Philippine Daily Inquirer which I am reproducing hereinbelow.
Editorial
A dangerous idea
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 23:04:00 02/18/2010
SENATE PRESIDENT JUAN PONCE ENRILE HAS A well-deserved reputation for legal acumen, but it is a reputation shadowed by a history of political ambition. His absurd and dangerous idea, first floated last September and then repeated the other day, that in case of a massive failure of elections later this year the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police can intervene and choose an acting head of government, is classic: it is, at one and the same time, patently unconstitutional and incredibly self-indulgent.
“Walang Presidente, walang Bise Presidente at walang Senate President, there is no one who will take over… Para hindi magkagulo, kailangang mag-take over ang military at pumili ng OIC [officer in charge] na mangangasiwa ng bansa pansamantala,” Enrile told ABS-CBN. His second sentence is clear enough even non-Filipino speakers can understand it: to prevent chaos, the military must take over and choose an OIC to govern the country temporarily.
He used a new provision in the Constitution (new, that is, in our constitutional history) to argue his position. Article II, Section 3 explicitly describes the Armed Forces as the “protector of the people and the State.”
Last September he included the Philippine National Police, as another of the state’s “institutions of legitimate violence,” in the caretaker role. “The Constitution is just a piece of document and if it is not enforced, nothing will happen,” he said then. “Who will enforce the Constitution? It is the police and the military if there is no civilian authority that can enforce it, that can issue the command.”
This is all wrong, and runs directly counter to the spirit of the Constitution Enrile says he wants to see enforced. In the first place, his fixation with a military solution to a potential political crisis reflects his own background: an eminent lawyer who served as Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law administrator, a powerful defense minister who encouraged the formation of a corps of military rebels in the depths of martial rule, an astute politician who masterminded a (failed) military coup against Marcos that was redeemed only by the first emergence of people power.
Secondly, Enrile is giving short shrift to the Constitution. The “protector of the people” provision was written into the post-Marcos Constitution precisely to prevent another military-backed dictatorship, not to provide the armed services with a back door through which they can enter the corridors of Malacañang. Indeed, the “protector of the people” provision comes only after the framers of the 1987 Constitution reiterated one of the fundamental principles of a genuine democracy: to wit, that civilian authority should at all times be supreme over the military. There is nothing in the Constitution, absolutely nothing, that empowers the AFP and the PNP to, as Enrile said last September, choose among themselves or from any institution “the one to run the country.”
Thirdly, Enrile pretends to see impossibilities where there are, at worst, only difficulties. “Imagine if you have no election, you have no president, no vice president, no Senate. The 12 senators cannot function. In fact there are only 11, one of them cannot vote. He is in judicial custody. There are only 11. They cannot function,” he said last year. (The 12th senator, of course, is Magdalo ringleader Antonio Trillanes IV.) We agree; they cannot function—if they wait until after June 30 to elect a Senate president who can serve as acting president in case of a general failure of elections. But why wait till then? The 14th Congress still has one more session left, in May. Why pretend that that possibility, of electing a new Senate president in May, does not exist?
Lastly, Enrile himself holds the key to the crisis he says we should avoid at all costs. Last September he could have offered to give up the Senate presidency, which he says he did not seek and does not need. The other day he could have offered to return to the Senate in May with the avowed intention to exercise his leadership in that chamber—the leadership that is the subject of his “Gusto Ko Happy Ka” (I want you to be happy) re-election campaign ads—to persuade his colleagues to elect a new Senate president before chaos erupts. Why didn’t he say so then? And why doesn’t he do so now?
It can only be self-indulgence. And that doesn’t make any of us happy.
See:
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/editorial/view/20100218-253971/A-dangerous-idea
