The presidential ruse is an empty bluff

Two of the world’s leading military minds have their works made mandatory reading in all military academies worldwide. I learned this from Dexter, my nephew, who graduated from the Philippine Military Academy. All students have to read thoroughly and know by heart the books of Carl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. Clausewitz was a Prussian general who was born in Germany and wrote “On War” (or Vòm Kriege). Sun Tzu, on the other hand, was a Chinese military general, strategist, philosopher, and writer who lived during the Eastern Zhou period and he was traditionally credited as the author of “The Art of War”. There is however an unverified claim that the name Sun Tzu was adopted by a group of brilliant Chinese generals at that time. According to military instructors both “On War”, which delves on military strategies of the western mind and the “Art of War” which views war from Oriental perspectives are considered the bible on military strategies and tactics.

From studying these books, we can learn that war, stripped of all attendant accessories, is actually the exercise and use of force for the attainment of a defined political object, unrestrained by any law save that of expediency. A necessary component of warfare in order to expedite the achievement of military goal is a resort to a ruse. Military tacticians say that a ruse of war is intended to mislead the adversary and to induce him to act recklessly in the expectation that the army of a misled enemy is ineffective and its reckless action disastrous.

This is how I take the statement of President Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos Jr. as his reaction to the filing of the case in the Supreme Court questioning the constitutionality of the recently approved General Appropriations Act of 2025 (GAA). The president used a ruse of war when he declared “No, we shut down everything. I guess that’s what they want. They want the government to cease working.” The president wants to mislead our countrymen into thinking that the legal action of retired senior Supreme Court associate justice Antonio Carpio can lead into a shut down government operations.

It is reported that Carpio led a group of nationalistic and non-politically aligned in assailing the legality of the 2025 budget. The main constitutional infirmity seen by Carpio et al may not be the blanks discovered in the budgetary law but certainly it is the rowdiest. To the ordinary citizens, it is the most despicable form of a plan to pillage the people’s money. That fraudulent scheme taints the entire law such that it can be totally voided.

To me though this presidential ruse is, if Clausewitz and Sun Tzu were alive to describe Marcos Jr.’s declaration, but a shallow bluff and an empty and hollow threat. There is no legal basis to so announce. President Marcos Jr. is wrong in threatening to shut down government operations if the Supreme Court should declare the GAA unconstitutional. It is not correct for the president to say that government will cease to exist if the 2025 law allocating funds to run it is held invalid.

On one hand, the president is of the apparent belief that the passing and approving the GAA is without legal infirmity. He might have been assured by the solicitor general that the budgetary enactment can stand scrutiny. On the other hand, the petitioners, of course, are confident that their position is legally tenable. In the event the Supreme Court rules that constitutional parameters are breached, government operations will not shut down. It will continue to exist. The appropriations in the 2024 budget will just be deemed re-enacted.