Warmer

The senators materialized in force for last Tuesday’s meeting of the Legislative-Executive Development Advisory Council (Ledac). That event raised hopes that government might be able to work again.

Relations between the presidency and the Senate have been icy since July last year, after Senate President Franklin Drilon and his faction, claiming to speak for the Liberal Party, publicly called on the President to resign. The rank-and file of the Liebral Party, shortly thereafter, repudiated the position taken by the Drilon group. Early this year, Drilon was ejected as party president.

Before and after that bizarre moment July last year, the Senate has done very little legislative work and indulged in interminable investigative circuses. The Senate has, through many months, behaved like a dysfunctional entity. While the rest of government worked hard, the Senate seemed on a stray course all by itself.

By now, it should be evident to Drilon and company that they have taken an untenable track.

If they do not get back to work, the reforms necessary to improve the national condition will continue to held hostage to incessant politicking. The Senate will increasingly be seen as the monkey wrench that hinders national progress.

I have always thought the Philippine Senate is the product of a design error. Because its members are elected nationwide, and the contest for the presidency has always been a multi-sided race in all the elections under the 1987 Constitution, it is usual that the senators are brought to office with more votes than the President of the Republic. That is simply how the arithmetic of this system works: voters write 12 names for senator and only one for president.

But because of the ultimately superfluous fact that they were brought to office with more votes than the President, the senators tend to behave strangely. They are imperious. In that small chamber, they act as if they were 24 different republics. Dazzled by the number of people who voted for them, some of them want to be President as soon as possible.

As the late Raul Roco found out twice, the fact that 12 million voters select you to be senator does not mean that the same number will select you to be President of the Republic. The impressive number of votes winning senators tally is simply the consequence of an arithmetical oddity.

Anyway, before we digress too far off, the senators who materialized at last Tuesday’s Ledac meeting, made every effort to communicate the thought that they were attending merely as a matter of duty. During the proceedings, they contributed very little. Unless asked, they did not speak. They made every effort to show as little enthusiasm as possible during this vital consultations.

But it was precisely their inability to focus on the work at hand that made this meeting necessary.

A number of vital pieces of legislation, worked on much earlier at the House of Representatives, gathered dust on the desks of the senators. Among these are: the Anti-Terrorism Law, revisions to the Electric Power Industry Reform Act, and, of course, the 2006 General Appropriations Act.

For five years, the Congress merely reenacted the national budget. This year’s budget, however, contains an extensive infrastructure program that is necessary both to improve our economy’s competitiveness and pump-prime economic activity so that we can move to a higher growth track.

Should the senators decide to hold the budget hostage – in order to prevent the administration’s programs from succeeding – then it will be the people who will finally be penalized by the paucity of statesmanship. We will remain trapped in the present track of low growth.

And then there is the matter of charter change.

On this matter, the relations between the Senate, on one hand, and the Presidency and the House on the other, appears at least half a degree warmer.

The President has put charter change at the top of her administration’s agenda. The senators, save for a few, have been totally unsympathetic. Some senators have said they were going to stop the charter change train in its tracks.

The same senators who, two months ago, launched a pathetic "Gloria Resign" campaign have threatened to take the rest of government to court if the charter change effort continues. The Senate President has earlier declared the chamber would be open only to calling in a constitutional convention – an option that virtually guarantees charter change will not happen in our lifetime.

The adamant posture the senators once maintained seems to have altered ever so slightly. But that is good enough for those, like me, who think this constitutional arrangement has become unsustainable and dysfunctional – and wish to see charter change happen at the soonest.

In a resolution, all the senators expressed the view that, in amending the charter, both chambers of Congress should vote separately.

That seems to signal a willingness on the part of the senators to at least discuss the possibility of moving on the urgent amendments by means of a constituent assembly. That is a significant softening of the Senate’s stance, considering that only a few weeks back they seemed determined to dig trenches and put up sandbags to prevent constitutional reform.

Softening their stance is a practical move. Had the Senate remained intransigent, the only other option for charter change advocates would be the popular initiative that is now in motion. This method of amending the charter will completely exclude the Senate from what could be a historic undertaking.

By opening the door a bit to indicate willingness to consider a constituent assembly, the senators now have leverage to bargain for the shape and detail of whatever change there might be in the Constitution. This is at least more preferable, from the political standpoint of the senators, than being shut out completely and overrun by a popular initiative.

The popular initiative, after all, sees the Senate as a costly mistake in the existing scheme of things. It proposed shift to a parliamentary system, if this pushes through, will make the Senate extinct and the senators homeless.