Administration's overkill of the opposition can boomerang

If the administration keeps on issuing suspension orders against members of the opposition, whether they are well-grounded or capricious and whimsical, such a pattern of overkill can boomerang in our country, with the large segment of our people whose culture inclines many to take the sides of the underdogs. The administration already controls both the executive departments and the legislature, it also attempts at controlling the administration of justice both judicial and quasi-judicial. The administration already controls the military and the police. It also controls both the government-owned and controlled corporations and the local government units. There is practically no opposition. The progressive party-list congressmen are voices crying in the wilderness.

It is not healthy in a democracy that both the Malacañang and the Senate as well as the House of Representatives are under the control and domination of one head of party in power, who is both head of state and head of government. There are no real checks and balances. This monopoly and concentration of powers breed abuses. For, as the sages repeatedly postulated, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. When the president wants a law passed, he calls on his allies to pass it with a sense of urgency. Whatever the president wants, the president gets. But when the president does not need the taxes to be lowered, Congress stops as told. When he wants government personnel's salaries raised, he gets it in no time at all. But the people are watching. Come elections, they will say their piece.

The administration insisted that the national budget should be finished before Christmas, and he is most probably getting it. No ifs and no buts. The president's men, including the DAP author Butch Abad and all his minions in the Senate and in the House are moving like it is the end of the world, in rushing the national appropriations act. This budget has all the earmarks of an election year budget. The Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program is a very clear form of institutionalized vote-buying. I was travelling last week from Ormoc to Tacloban. I saw thousands of women and children, led by the DSWD in the town of Alang-alang, Leyte who were made to march under the heat of early afternoon sun, demonstrating with placards demanding that Congress should never reduce the Pantawid budget.

If the administration keeps on pushing for the disqualification of Grace Poe, and the arrest of Vice President Jojo Binay and also the derailment of Mayor Digong Duterte's candidacy, then Mar Roxas may end up running alone. And that would be an overkill. The Filipinos do not want any overkill. The decent, fair-minded and level-headed Filipinos in fact, hate any overkill. The administration's appointees control the three constitutional commissions, namely the Commission on Election, the Commission on Audit, and the Civil Service Commission.

The president appoints justices for both the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals and all the judges, even the Municipal Circuit Courts, the Sandiganbayan and all the prosecutors. The opposition is indeed a frail and lonely David against thousands of Goliaths.

But, at the end of the day, too much concentration of powers does not sit well in the minds of the good men and women in the whole nation. If the administration continues with its policy of maximizing its use of powers in order to weaken the opposition, then the government would be virtually destroying the nation itself. The administration cannot make use of its powers over the budget, over the financial resources in order to give aid and comfort to administration bets.

The party in power cannot continue to abuse its power to appoint, its power to tax, its power to oust and suspend officials who do not belong to the ruling coalition. The people will most likely neutralize the government by voting them out of office.

The polls next year shall put an end to the trend to concentrate political, economic and other powers in the hands of only few men. If the opposition in Congress and in the LGUs cannot or will not resist these abuses, then the people shall take over via the powers of the ballot. The clear patterns of abuses being committed by the administration shall generate no other consequences but an emerging consciousness among the people themselves that it is time to stop all these excesses. Sobra Na, Tama Na, Wakasan Na. Yes, the bullies shall soon realize that all their excesses shall boomerang in their own faces. By May 2016, they will not know what shall hit them.