Democratic backsliding

Democratic backsliding | Daily Tribune

On the infamous 2025 flood control corruption, the unresolved puzzle amounts to whether it’s the legislative that cedes power to the executive or the other way around. There’s that unsettled and disconcerting confusion if the former House Speaker, as a standalone, authored the entire budgetary mess or if the President so ordered it to an alter ego.

As international examples of democratic backsliding indicate, “when weak legislatures cede power to the executive, authoritarian leaders can more easily consolidate power.” The continuing stream of commissioning of new second lieutenants to the tri-services and promotion of new generals and flag ranks set an imbalance over civilian counterparts. Worse, the salaries, allowances, retirement and pension benefits of military and uniformed personnel already breached the 6-digit cap.

If the leadership can just mangle the 2025 national budget beyond reconstruction and such “craftmanship” even cascaded to the 2026 budget proposal, how can it not have “overstepped its bounds” to retire the 1987 Constitution in favor of a newly minted Charter that vests unilateral authority over all other institutions below the presidency? The legislature is literally stripped of its powers since it served more as Malacañang’s rubber stamp. With 97 executive orders and over 1,200 presidential issuances up his sleeve, playing authoritarian or autocrat is not stranger than fiction.

Like the floods that made folks and communities hapless victims with deaths, injuries, loss of homes and crops because flood mitigating structures could not contain the runoff, the 19th Congress “flooded” the 4,057-page GAA of 2025 with hidden lump sums in the unprogrammed appropriations. As if by tradecraft, it caused “fund impoundment” through cuts in the education and health sector allocations, unusual budget duplicities over programs, anomalous “granular budgeting,” “fragmentation or splitting of contract,” among other things.

No solid proof to justify prior suspicions, nay, belief as to who the mastermind of the “floodgate” was could come about with the “state-sponsored” ICI. From the initial work of the Marcoleta-led Senate Blue Ribbon Committee to the Lacson takeover punctuated by a leadership vacuum (when Lacson resigned to when he reoccupied the BRC), the investigative momentum shifted to low gear as if to allow the ICI to keep abreast.

The intervening institutionalization of an ICI does not achieve the desired results as it neither follows the directions set by either Lacson or Marcoleta. The real brains behind the whole operation and his gang of crooks go scot-free as though ICI invariably cherry-picked whom to hold accountable.

With a universal viewing screen rendering us all hostage to Facebook as the central train station, as if it was, only one decent option is left in all these social movements against a government at near end of having lost the trust of the people and therefore its legitimacy. The President ought to not deserve any more sleep until he finds the way out of the noose; to shout “eureka” when he so succeeds.

Self-reflectingly, he must be asking himself these questions, viz: 1.) must I cling to my office beyond 2028 till kingdom come; 2.) must I call for a snap election or referendum that Congress may duly legislate; 3.) must I leave in the middle of the night with my family to an undisclosed place; 4.) must I declare martial law and abolish both chambers of Congress; 5.) must I now govern as an authoritarian or a despot; 6.) must I allow the legislature to initiate an impeachment leading to my removal from office; 7.) must I let the horde declare the President incapacitated to discharge his duties; 8.) must I acknowledge with a kind heart the underlying meaning of these protests and civil movements — how the whole Congress bled government coffers dry, the negative media coverage and discordant public discourse, the general loss of trust and confidence that brings a government to its knees?

The new base pay hike for military and uniformed personnel might buy loyalty for the administration on the precipice of its political survival or demise. Que sera, sera.