Assert your independence

By Alex P. Vidal

 

“True independence and freedom can only exist in doing what’s right.”

—Brigham Young

 

WE exhort the congresswomen and congressmen from Western Visayas to assert their independence from the executive branch now that lines have been drawn in the national legislature.

If their colleagues from other regions can’t, the Ilonggo solons should spearhead the move.

Since time immemorial when everything is not right in our national government, it’s always the Ilonggo leaders that are in the frontline to correct the abnormality and inspire others to do what is moral, ethical, and legal.

The House of Representatives has virtually lost its independence and power with the installation of “ass licker” Lord Allan Jay Velasco as the new speaker.

The entire episode is a mockery of decency and the government system.

Because he owed his speakership to President Rodrigo R. Duterte like the defrocked Alan Peter Cayetano, the Lower House under Velasco would now become a sitting duck under the present administration.

Under Velasco, the House of Representatives would definitely become a stamping pad of the executive branch.

 

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What President Duterte wants from the lawmakers he will get without the need to storm the Bastille.

In the first place, the act of Messrs. Cayetano and Velasco to seek Mr. Duterte’s blessings for a term-sharing in the leadership of a separate government branch was already a mistake if not a cowardly move to downgrade the Lower House.

It’s a virtual act of sycophancy.

As grown-ups they were supposed to know that the speakership row was an internal affair of the House of Representatives.

It’s the members who cast the votes to choose their speaker, not the President who is in charge of another independent branch of the government.

 

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By asking President Duterte to decide who should be the speaker of the legislative branch of the Philippines was tantamount to technically rewriting the constitution on their own whimsical manner, and throwing away to the dustbin the principle of co-equal branch in the system of the Philippine government.

If the Supreme Court will also allow the President to dictate who should be the next Chief Justice, it’s better to abolish both the congress and the courts and let Mr. Duterte run the entire system of the government as a despotic ruler under a dictatorial regime if that is what they are trying to convey.

 

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two dailies in Iloilo)