IN an interview, retired Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonio Carpio stated that the people’s initiative (PI) is unconstitutional for it introduces revisions, not amendments to the Constitution. Further, he opined that the alteration of the system of checks and balances will result in a revision of the Constitution. He further opines that the bicameral nature of our Legislative Department will be adversely affected by the joint voting of Senate and the House of Representatives during the Con-Ass.
I do not agree. When the members of Congress sits as a Constituent Assembly, I have been emphasizing that they are no longer acting as legislators, but as constituents. Their mandate is no longer to craft ordinary laws which are not required to be ratified by the people, where the bicameral nature of Congress comes into play for checks and balances. As the members of Con-Ass, the law makers have a different Constitutional mandate now, separate and distinct from their responsibilities under the Article VI of the Constitution. Their mandate is to act as one, as a singular entity, a single assembly, to propose changes to the Constitution that will be thrown to the people for their final say.
The Constitution is a carefully prepared and precisely crafted document. The division of the subject matters and functions to separate Articles were made purposefully to highlight the different duties and responsibilities, or delegation of powers it hands out. If the intention of the Constitution is for the bicameral nature of the Legislative Department to subsist when proposing changes to the Constitution, then Amendments and Revisions as a Con-Ass should have been included in Article VI – Legislative Department where bicameralism is mandated, and not in an Article of its own.
This separation is a deliberate act of the framers of the Constitution to distinguish the different functions and mandates of the varying Constitutionally created bodies. This separation highlights the fact that when acting as a Constituent Assembly, the members of both chambers of Congress no longer occupy the same position, but are now holding a much higher position than that of an ordinary legislator, answerable directly to people in a plebiscite.
But if Justice Carpio and the rest of the opposition still insist that the instant movement is a revision and not an amendment, the Supreme Court laid down the two tests to determine whether a proposed change is an amendment or revision. These are the quantitative and the qualitative test. I submit that when pitted against these two tests, the proposed change is merely an amendment, capable of being introduced by the people directly.
Briefly, the quantitative test looks at the number of provisions that will be changed or affected, or asks whether the proposed change is so extensive in its provisions as to change directly the substantial entirety of the Constitution by the deletion or alteration of numerous existing provisions. Broken down in lay man’s terms, the quantitative test looks number of provisions that will be changed, if numerous then it can be argued that the change is a revision. This movement only seeks to change a single sentence.
The second test is the qualitative test, which looks into whether the proposed change will accomplish far reaching changes in the nature of our basic governmental plan as to amount to a revision. A change in the nature of the basic governmental plan includes change in its fundamental framework of the fundamental powers of its branches. This also includes changes that jeopardize the traditional form of government, or affects the system of checks and balances. The last example is used by Justice Carpio to justify his position.
But a carefully scrutiny of the Constitution reveals that the system of checks and balances will not be altered by this proposal when it comes to amendments and revisions. The system is set by the Constitution itself when it imposed that a plebiscite should be held for the particular purpose of introducing changes, where the majority of the votes cast will decide the fate of the proposal. This was not changed or even touched upon by the proposed amendment.
The question now is “who has the better moral and Constitutional authority to perform the checks and balances than the sovereign Filipino people themselves?” Let the people decide.
