Silly

Shortly before the Lenten break, five senators staged a truly pathetic media event: they corralled a handful of Senate employees, put on ‘Gloria resign’ stickers on their expensive SUVs and declared they would mount a massive political campaign after they return from their respective vacation spots.

That sad event happened against an even sadder backdrop: the ledgers tell us that the Senate used up a budget of P6.1 billion the past year. And for all that money, they managed to pass six uneventful laws. Each piece of legislation cost the taxpayers of this country over a billion pesos.

That is at least an improvement over the preceding year where, under the hardworking leadership of Senate President Franklin Drilon, the Senate passed only five laws for the same budget.

I was with a group of local government executives the last weekend and found them indulging in a really pitiful fantasy-building exercise: working the arithmetic on scraps of paper, they were estimating what sort of things they could have done had the P6.1 billion Senate budget been distributed to the local governments instead.

Well, the five hardworking senators are back from their favorite vacation spots.

From what we have seen so far, it seems they did not put as much work between the swimming pool and their cold drinks to plot out a workable framework of strategy and tactics to push ahead their declared political agenda.

That terrifying nemesis of the Arroyo administration, Senate President Franklin Drilon, resurfaced a few days ago at the Club Filipino to launch a movement purporting to stop the charter change train in its tracks. That movement is creatively named STOP (Sa Tamang Oras at Paraan).

Apart from the creativity of its acronym, the movement’s strategy does not seem to be well thought out. While the senators were vacationing, it appears the task of developing a strategy fell on the laps of Dinky Soliman.

Dinky was the brains behind that brilliant strategy for overthrowing this government consisting of chilling out in black shirts at select Starbucks outlets – presumably with black iced coffee in hand. All that strategy accomplished was a flood of derisive humor from all over the globe.

Starbucks soon became wary of customers wearing black. And in the face of adverse reviews, Dinky thought it best to shift her strategy for upheaval.

Shortly after, Dinky and her black-shirted gang decided to bring their protest to the masses by promenading with their "Now Na" garments at the Baywalk – never too far from the creature comforts of fried chicken outlets and tolerable cafes. Unfortunately, the police thought they had crossed the line by doing so: Dinky and her gang were booked for rallying without a permit.

Civil liberties might have been better served if the authorities let loose the fashion police instead on Dinky and her friends. In this summer’s incredible heat, the worst possible color to wear is black.

With Dinky in charge of strategy (Drilon and his patroness Cory Aquino appearing only to provide the celebrity pull for their media events), we can almost be sure STOP will be stopped in its track by the sheer silliness of the line of attack it chose.

STOP aims to gather enough affidavits from people withdrawing their signatures from the people’s initiative launched by the Sigaw ng Bayan. Each affidavit, we suppose, will be carefully prepared and duly notarized. I suppose, too, that each affidavit will have to devise a unique excuse for why a person who signed earlier is now withdrawing his or her signature. Those excuses will range from a claim of signing under duress to plain short-term memory loss. Each affidavit, with several copies, will be duly submitted to the Comelec officials charged with verifying the number of signatures in each district.

That sounds like a lot of paper work. A lot of paper, too. And a lot of income for notaries.

Remember that Sigaw ng Bayan is now claiming close to nine million signatures. By next week, the people’s initiative aims to collect 12 million – roughly a third of all voters, way above the 3 percent per district and 12 percent of the gross that the law requires.

In order to invalidate that, STOP should produce at least 6 million affidavits of withdrawal – with signatures, thumbprints, notary seals and all – within the next two or three weeks. That is a humungous task. The logistical requirements will be staggering.

More daunting, it will require a lot of work from people not used to doing that: like the senators.

At first glance, this is an unworkable strategy. It could not be done, even by Hercules himself.

It will bring the contest between advocates and opponents of constitutional reform into an uneven race: for the effort required to produce one affidavit of withdrawal, Charter change advocates can collect a thousand more signatures on their standardized forms.

Worse, even if it is done to some limited extent, it could not legally infirm the people’s initiative. It will not stop the train.

The senators, using the Senate staff, are trying their damn best to contribute to this silly effort. The harder they try, the deeper they dig themselves into a legal and moral dilemma: they are, after all, using public funds to help stop a people’s initiative.

That is an irony tough to untangle.

It will be immensely better, as Sigaw ng Bayan suggests, for the strange assortment of personalities behind STOP to instead use their time and resources mounting a counter-education campaign.

But then, this is a shrewd trap. If more people participate in the "great debate" called by the President, the issue of Charter change will become more prominent, overshadowing all the other issues the opposition might want to raise instead.

Worse, the people behind STOP will have to take up the challenge of presenting us with real arguments about why political reform should not be done. What those arguments could be is difficult to imagine.

If they continue to refuse to help in educating our people, instead of producing a heap of inane affidavits, the people behind STOP might be interrogated for their motives instead.