Savings, errata and postmodern politics

I don’t know if I am going to get away with this, or if my colleagues in political science will agree, but I am going to reiterate a bold claim I have been making a long time ago, but now given more proof by recent developments. I believe that the kind of politics that we have right now is postmodern.

 

I mean, we have been seeing a government, whose very existence is supposed to rest on the stability of laws, particularly the Constitution, and of institutions, such as the Supreme Court, yet its President and Congress are at the forefront of undermining both.

 

In theory, the rubric we use to measure the stability of constitutional democracies lie on how they endure the turbulence of politics. Modern states rely on the certainty of laws and the predictability of institutional rules and norms. This is precisely why the discipline of political science has imported methodologies from the natural sciences in its inquiry into the rather stochastic, random, chaotic and probabilistic nature of politics. This is to increase the predictability of politics, which in turn will heighten its controllability.

 

But as we all know, politics remain as unpredictable and unstable. This is why political communities have rested on the majestic discourse of laws that are encoded and encapsulated in written edicts. This is also why the volatility of Congress and the whims and caprices of the Executive have to be checked by a steady, detached and dispassionate domain that is found in the halls of the Supreme Court.

 

The Supreme Court is the branch of government whose role is to check the adventurism and unpredictability of politics, brought about by the exigencies and pragmatic consideration of legislative partisanships and executive prerogatives. The Court has always been treated as one where the grand narrative of modern statecraft lies. It is a place where this narrative takes shape and emerges to impose its final determination of what would make our political community safe and secure from the risks and uncertainties brought about by the excesses and failures of executives and legislatures. It has been referred to as the last bulwark of democracy.

 

But recently, the political branches of government, i.e. the President aided by Congress, have been on a warpath with the Supreme Court. In the name of what it has presented as a reform agenda, it has practically deconstructed the grand narrative that ensures the stability of our polity. No less than the President himself declared in one interview that the reason why he wanted to amend the Constitution is to clip the wings of what he now considers as an overreaching Court.

 

Stung by the Court’s ruling that the Executive branch has abused the definition of savings when the former ruled that some of the provisions of the DAP violated the Constitution, the President, through the Department of Budget and Management, sent to the House of Representatives a budget for 2015 that effectively goes around the ruling of the Court. Contained in its provisions is the move to redefine “savings” contrary to any existing common sense, and academic accounting or public finance definition. 

 

Budgets are enacted as laws, and hence have the power of a law. Congress is the branch of government that has the sole power to enact laws, and therefore has the sole prerogative to pass the budget. But there are certain principles that have already acquired their accepted definitions, either through the power of practice and common knowledge, or through the power of science and logic, and are beyond legislative tinkering. The concept of “savings” is one of these, where in theory no legislative fiat could theoretically change its meaning. 

 

But through the sheer impetus of an executive tantrum, and accorded legitimacy by a pliant legislature, the legal meaning of the word “savings” has been destabilized. It is ironic that in this instance, the power of a law to fix the definition has been co-opted by the Executive, even as we now see the specter of a Congress that will actively participate in passing a budget that has provisions that are bound to effectively castrate its power over the purse.    

 

And this is not even the end of it. Now, Congress and the President are poised to undermine the ideal constructs that my discipline of political ccience has been teaching our students on how laws are supposed to be crafted. They are now forcing us to accept a 269-page addition to the budget bill, already passed on second reading, as simply an “errata.”

 

Any student of legislative politics will tell you that all amendments to any bill, be they emanating from the relevant legislative committee or from individual legislators, are to be discussed and voted upon in plenary, and only when approved can such be integrated in the revised draft bill, which in turn will be subjected to a vote on second reading. Any addition after the second reading are allowed only if they are minor corrections in style and grammar or to correct typographical errors. This is precisely why it would be correct to call these as “errata.”

 

But it is clear that additional appropriations not approved on second reading, and corrections in amounts not duly debated and voted upon during the period of amendments, could not, in theory and in practice, be considered as mere “errata” but are in fact substantial amendments. To make us believe that these are in the character of minor corrections would be another example of a government whose legislative and executive branches have deconstructed the usual way of governing. It is now making us accept the negotiability of definitions, even as it effectively undermines the grand narratives found in the established logic behind the legislative process, as taught in Political Science and as practiced in many legislatures in the world.

 

On hindsight, I could even admit that our politics has always had the seeds of postmodernity, where negotiability is more the norm than the exception, and where grand narratives embodied in established theories and practices are not respected.

 

We have practically redefined political practices. We are perhaps the only country where minority senators are allowed to head committees. The way we conduct our Senate hearings has deviated from how hearings should be ideally conducted.  

 

But now we are increasingly witnessing our Constitution being openly challenged and undermined, without even mounting a coup. We have a Visiting Forces Agreement that subordinates our sovereignty to another country, and our President welcomes it as essential to our survival. And we are willing to dilute the unitary nature of our country by deploying the word “asymmetrical” in proposing a parliamentary form of a sub-state in a territory where political parties, the textbook requisite of a parliamentary system, are at best weak, if not non-existent.

 

In short, everything is negotiable in Philippine politics. We deconstruct and destabilize well-established political concepts, constructs and processes. 

 

In political theory, these are telltale signs of the post-modern.


The author is a former dean of De La Salle University. He is currently a full professor of political science at DLSU. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of this website.