MANILA, Philippines - It seems a Constitution can contain, in its provisions, the seeds of its own destruction. The 1935 Constitution, even if it was the finest charter ever devised by the Filipino people, contained just such a poisoned pill. It bequeathed the colonial martial law powers of the American governors-general to Filipino presidents, but did so without providing for any possibility for appeal, review and a repeal of any martial law proclamation. Claro M. Recto, president of the Convention that drafted that constitution, warned of that dire possibility in the 1950s. But there was little reason for Filipinos then to echo the dark thoughts of Recto concerning those he called the ?Neros and Caligulas? of his time.
That was because, to the credit of the older generation of Filipinos, their imaginations were both wider and narrower than today?s crop of buccaneering officials. While Recto warned his contemporaries of the dangers of ?Neros and Caligulas? using the Constitution to establish a dictatorship, most reacted with disbelief: replying that not even an aspiring Nero or Caligula would dare do such a thing.
On the eve of World War II, the National Assembly had passed sweeping emergency powers for the president; yet interestingly enough, during the war martial law was never imposed and there was, in fact, a great deal of ill-humored wrangling between Commonwealth officials who were jealous of their powers being encroached upon by American military men. It may be that the only reason martial law was not proclaimed was that the Philippine Army had been subsumed into the armed forces of the United States; still, even in wartime a more profoundly civilian orientation was retained, and one that somehow survived the war, even with the great number of military veterans entering the government service.
Even President Quirino, who tried to insist the wartime emergency powers had never been revoked, and thus were still his to wield in the 1950s, abandoned the assertion when rebuked by the Supreme Court. Neither Magsaysay as he hunted down the Huks and, in a sense, integrated the armed forces into the civilian bureaucracy, nor his successors, often frustrated by Congress, contemplated martial law.
The only time martial law had been proclaimed was during the Japanese Occupation by a de facto president armed with an authoritarian constitution neither recognized nor respected by the country at large. And even then, it was largely a symbolic move, never ratified by the National Assembly, as required by the so-called 1943 Constitution.
So indeed, nobody dared, that is, until Ferdinand Marcos came along. It took Marcos, who assiduously studied the authoritarian political thought of the Laurel years, to revisit the Sept. 21, 1944 proclamation of martial law, paying tribute to it by backdating his own proclamation to Sept. 21, 1972 (and for his own numerological satisfaction). This proved the ultimate of his many feats of political jujitsu?an apt term for the patently oriental ruthless efficiency with which he dealt with the niceties of Western-style constitutionalism.
The 1935 Charter, for example, encouraged a more limited proclamation??the country or any part thereof??under specific conditions??invasion or rebellion or imminent danger thereof??yet Marcos went further and proclaimed a New Society which was never contemplated as a justification for martial law by the Constitution or its drafters.
Some of the drafters of our present Constitution have used their moral authority and prestige to plead for sticking to the straight and narrow path of constitutionalism. They continue to do so, even as the President and her people have experimented with all sorts of jujitsu moves with the Marcos model in mind. They have done so both from a genuine conviction that the solution of People Power is a cure more dangerous than the disease (the incumbent administration) and from the purely selfish motive of authors jealously out to preserve their claim to fame, their constitutional offspring. Yet whatever their motives, the problem that arises from their defense of the Constitution is that its provisions made possible the regime that has so alienated the public.
Never mind the untidy nature of what passes for our democratic system, with its parliamentary style multiparty system which achieves neither genuine representation for the marginalized nor the fundamental requirement for a stable and effective presidential administration, which is a solid and unquestionable majority after each election. Some of the President?s cleverer drum-beaters have, fairly, pointed out that under the present system every administration is doomed to failure from the start.
What matters most, now, is how defenders of the Constitution are faced with the very real possibility that its own provisions will be used to accomplish its amendment under circumstances and in a manner its drafters never intended. By all accounts, until the very last minute the drafters of the Constitution thought they were writing provisions for a unicameral system; when bicameralism was approved in a real squeaker of a vote, the rush to complete the Charter led to its actual provisions on amendments in Congress not being in harmony with a bicameral legislature.
Which was not a problem so long as no one would dare. But the daring?and political derring-do?now looks to the jujitsu of the Marcos years, plotted by veterans of his administration. It?s all very tidy: since the Constitution is written in a manner in keeping with amendments being proposed, deliberated upon and voted upon by a unicameral legislature, regardless of the intent of the drafters, the Supreme Court can be asked to interpret the Constitution literally. And what is to stop the Supreme Court from doing so? Nothing: the seed of a poisonous fruit having been planted, and germinated, over the past 20 years.
