As the saying goes, keep your friends close, and your enemies even closer. When President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo announced she was reviving efforts to amend the Philippine Constitution, no one was more surprised than her allies in the House of Representatives. The announcement came at a time when the political opposition was beginning to recover its enthusiasm due to a very public fight between the son of the speaker of the House and the president's Cabinet over a lucrative Internet deal with China. The fallout from that fight had led, and once again, to the word "impeachment." It seemed that the president was headed for a showdown with the speaker of the House.
Then the president spoke and revived one of the speaker's pet plans, constitutional amendments.
What will make this version of Charter Change different is that it will be focused on Federalism, an original component of the administration's first Charter Change efforts in 2005-2006, but eventually dropped in favor of the parliamentary system. What two foiled impeachment attempts failed to do, the president and the speaker's insistence on ramming through constitutional amendments seemed poised to accomplish: Unite the fragmented voices of the opposition into a widespread movement mobilized against the administration. The Palace and the House of Representatives blinked, and dropped the idea.
On the surface, President Arroyo's motives for reviving the divisive constitutional debate seems not just opportunistic, but clumsy. The opposition says it's a smokescreen to divert attention from the scandals that have not only embarrassed the administration (since the administration is incapable of feeling embarrassment) but more significantly, begun to erode administration support among its key constituencies in the business, religious, and professional sectors. To be sure, if one's allies are beginning to lose confidence, an embattled administration gains if it throws out an issue that divides its critics as much as it divides its supporters.
Not least because the issue, while divisive in itself, can be a means to restore unity among the president's increasingly divided ruling coalition.
The administration, for example, decided to deprive the speaker of his biggest leverage in exacting concessions from the president. Any speaker of the House can either facilitate, or make difficult, the filing of an impeachment complaint and its subsequent handling by the House of Representatives. In 2005 and 2006, Speaker Jose de Venecia, Jr. went out of his way to organize inter-party support to crush impeachment efforts against the president. But this year, having been dragged into a fight between his son and the president's Cabinet, the speaker seemed more inclined to weigh his options.
By all accounts, ways were found to deprive the speaker of the luxury of political options. An impeachment complaint that seemed more interested in cataloging the speaker (and his son's) alleged legal transgressions, than those of the president against whom the complaint was supposedly directed, was filed. The speaker still seemed inclined to draw the process out rather than give it short shrift. The answer to this was for the president to summon 180 congressmen, an overwhelming majority, to the presidential palace. The signal was obvious: The president, not the speaker, had the numbers, both in terms of impeachment and in terms of determining the leadership of the House.
The speaker saved face by saying he would inhibit himself from dispensing with a self-incriminating impeachment complaint. The rest of the House leadership then stepped in and dispensed with the referral of the complaint, which, under Philippine jurisprudence means no other impeachment complaint against the president will be entertained for a year.
But this still left the question of whether, having gone so far, the speaker could be trusted with the leadership of the House. To topple the speaker, though, would eliminate, forever, a valuable political ally and possibly make the House even more difficult for the president to control.
Whether this new focus on federalism is meant to muster local government support, and salve the wounded feelings of original Civil Society allies of the Palace, remains to be seen - just as whether this is an effort to put the president's imprint on this version in contrast to the parliamentary focus of the speaker who pushed for the previous effort: After all, having solved the president's impeachment-related problem for 2007-2008, the speaker is now dispensable (despite warnings from the speaker that if he falls, she falls, which he said he told her in a one-on-one meeting Sec. Puno denies ever happened).
The political opening, of course, would be, such a shift would require some sort of transitional government.
The Asia Sentinel recently observed, "With the president out by 2010, however, her hold may be waning as junior leaders look toward their political futures." Political analyst Mon Casple in his blog, says the ruling coalition is also increasingly paranoid, a situation, Casiple says, has been compounded by a lot of factors: Among them are "the continued political challenges coming from the opposition, the inexorable deadline of the 2010 end-of-GMA-term, the wily play of the presidentiables, the US and Western concern over growing Chinese influence, health problems of key administration players, and the flexing of the military's political clout".
As the political class's attention increasingly focuses on 2010, the Palace has to find ways to keep itself relevant to the political class. An effective way is to keep everyone guessing what the president's real intentions are concerning 2010 and one way is to keep local government officials and legislators coming back to the trough for regular fattening.
This becomes even more interesting in light of what the president is poised to do next year: Enjoy the opportunity to appoint a new Civil Service Commissioner, new Commission on Audit Chairman, several Supreme Court justices, etc. Why kill a valuable ally, when you can simply politically castrate him? Why topple the speaker, if you can reduce him to being a political decoration? And why not offer him a chance to save face, and do something useful, by dangling the prospects of constitutional change? As another saying goes, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
