No-el

The worst I feared had happened: the politicians who nurse ambitions within the existing paradigm of our politics have preempted public debate about changing the constitutional order by focusing their claptrap on the proposed transitory provision canceling the 2007 elections.

For the record, I voted against that provision when it was hotly debated at the Consultative Commission. I voted against it because I feared that, like a black hole, this provision would suck in all the other sound reforms we presented as a draft Constitution.

That particular provision found its way to the final draft because of strong representations by the various local government leagues. The local executives represented at the Consultative Commission, despite their personal reservations, heeded the stand of their colleagues at the ULAP.

The provision was voted down by a slight majority Tuesday last week. I was not in the session Wednesday morning when the matter was reopened on a motion for reconsideration. The "no-elections" provision passed by an equally slight majority.

Notwithstanding the position I took at the Consultative Commission, which led me to abstain during the vote on the final draft late Thursday night after days of exhausting debate, I do understand the logic that inspires this provision.

A shift from presidential to parliamentary government will not be an easy one. We cannot just snap our fingers and, in an instant, the form of government shifts.

The shift will be complicated and precarious, considering the degree to which our usual politics has been poisoned the past few years. While that shift is being undertaken, the continuity of local governments will provide the crucial stabilizing factor, providing the whole process with a base of continuity.

Re-reading the transitory provisions in the draft we submitted to the President last Friday, the cancellation of the 2007 elections does seem like an indispensable cog in the whole design.

In the design for transition submitted by the Consultative Commission, the elected senators with unexpired terms after 2007 will automatically be part of the interim parliament along with the entire membership of the House of Representatives. The terms of all the local government officials will be extended to 2010, when a full-fledged Parliament shall be elected into place.

The Interim Prime Minister will, by constitutional command, be part of the President’s Cabinet. A major portion of that Cabinet will be composed of elected members of the Interim Parliament.

However, the President may appoint 30 new members to the Interim Parliament based on their specific areas of expertise. This will allow the Interim Parliament to benefit from technocratic reinforcement. It will, quite obviously, help strengthen the President’s political presence in that Interim Parliament even as the legislative assembly strengthens its presence in the executive branch preparatory to a shift to a full parliamentary system.

That seems fair enough to me.

My major concern is that uncertainty and discontinuity be minimized. In the modern global economy, the financial markets play a controlling role that must be taken very carefully into consideration.

The moment any uncertainty happens, the financial markets respond instantaneously. Our bonds, today the main component of our sovereign indebtedness, will be trashed. Interest rates on financing we need will rise through the ceiling and our credit rating will drop through the floor.

That is the reality we must contend with.

It is that reality I kept invoking when I resisted the prior formula for shifting to federalism by means of a constitutionally mandated timetable. A rapid shift, without evolving the capacity of the sub-national units to raise their revenues would imperil the national government’s ability to manage our large overhanging debt. That will make the markets nervous and force them to penalize us with stiff interest rates and credit ratings downgrades commensurate to their perception of risk.

Politicians and ivory tower designers of political systems often tend to neglect the consequences of what they do and what they say on the estimates of our creditworthiness by the markets. It is ordinary Filipinos who pay the price for their folly in terms of sharply higher inflation rates and deeper poverty.

Yet, there can be no change without courting risks. The old political philosopher Machiavelli did point out that nothing is more difficult for statesmen than overseeing change. It is immensely easier for politicians to postpone change and pass the costs of not doing anything deep into the future, to generations they do not feel responsible for.

Our political system is very sick. It is outdated. The more we insist on continuing on with this constitutional order, the more we risk ineffectualness and breakdown.

We can taunt and taint the provision canceling the 2007 elections. But that will not help us evolve a new constitutional order more adept in keeping this nation well governed.

I did not support that provision during the deliberations at the Consultative Commission. But I will support it in the public debate.

I will do so because it is a component part of a package of transition measures that will allow us to finally move out of a degenerate constitutional order that cripples our capacity to be competitive globally and fosters a mode of politics that poisons our lives.

True, it will retain the incumbent political class that is difficult to praise. But it will also alter their historical role in the transition, making them agents of continuity that allows change to happen with least cost.

Like most citizens, I am sick and tired of the bankrupt politics that has engulfed our civic culture and strangles our democratic practices. The sooner change happens in our constitutional order, the better off we will be in fashioning a more preferential future for our people.

True, there are compromises to be made. But those compromises are overshadowed by the benefits to be derived by pushing this process ahead.