The Nationalist People’s Coalition (NPC), the second largest political party in the country, yesterday asked Senate President Franklin Drilon and other senators anew to exercise statesmanship and "give premium to national interest" by heeding the growing clamor for constitutional reform for a shift to a "less divisive" parliamentary system via a constituent assembly.
Tarlac Rep. Gilberto Teo-doro, head of the NPC contingent in the House and nephew of NPC founder Eduardo Cojuangco, said the present presidential system with two chambers of Congress — the Senate and the House — is founded on a "principle of mistrust of power, so there is already a built-in antagonism between institutions of government."
"Given the urgency of the situation," Teodoro said, "senators should give the premium now to national interest. The election of 2004 must be for a purpose other than continuing a system (of governance) that has proven inadequate."
Teodoro was reacting to Drilon’s statement last week that the Senate does not favor a constituent assembly as a mode of Charter change. Instead, Drilon favors the election of delegates to a constitutional convention that will amend the 1987 Constitution.
Next to the ruling Lakas-Christian Muslim Democrats party, the NPC is the largest political party in the Philippines, with 65 legislators, 25 governors and scores of mayors and local officials in the vote-rich provinces of Pangasinan, Tarlac, Bicol, Negros, Isabela and Nueva Ecija.
Under the proposed parliamentary system, the House and Senate will be abolished and replaced with a unicameral legislature with a prime minister running the affairs of state and a president as head of state.
According to its proponents, a constituent assembly is a safe, inexpensive and quick mode by which the Charter can be amended. They contend that a constitutional convention would cost P8 billion in taxpayers’ money, be politically divisive and may endanger the Constitution by exposing it to wholesale revision.
They said that under the current resolutions filed before both the House and the Senate, the only changes that would be made to the Constitution through a constitutional assembly will be the presidential form of government, which will be switched to a parliamentary system with a fixed transition to a federal system.
"Let them (the senators) answer to their conscience and to the people," House Deputy Speaker Raul Gonzalez said. "I will always appeal to the senators to uphold the greater interest of the nation."
Administration legislators said the Senate has been sitting on over a hundred national bills and about 500 local bills. These lawmakers said that the creation of national high schools and pending bills on reforestation have taken a back seat to investigations that have nothing to do with lawmaking, are a waste of time and public funds and which cause instability.
Teodoro said political instability is causing foreign investors to avoid the Philippines, thus depriving the country of much needed foreign capital.