Sweet sixteen

In its 238 years of existence, the United States Constitution has been amended only 27 times. The foundational structure and core elements of its system of government — tripartite, with clear voting rules — have remained largely unchanged.

Even during its most trying times — the Civil War (1861 to 1865) and the aftermath of 9/11, where the very existence of the Union was threatened — the United States has never dared tamper with its Fundamental Law.

And those times when the Americans deemed it fit to alter their Constitution, it was to favor the strengthening of civil liberties and broaden suffrage rights. The ensuing stability in its political framework has made the United States the world power that it is today.

Contrast that with the Philippines. Not counting the Malolos Constitution and the many organic acts imposed upon us by our American colonizers, since 1945 we’ve not only amended our Charter many times but we’ve had three entirely new ones!

The latest is supposed to be a product of our dictatorial trauma during the Marcos Sr. years. Its fifty handpicked framers had one overriding mission: to make sure that the experiences under the 1973 Constitution were not repeated. That document was drafted and heavily manipulated under Martial Law, where several Constitutional Convention members were either arrested or forced into hiding. Sound familiar?

The end result in 1973 was a Frankenstein’s monster: a mutant parliamentary system ratified dubiously, and under which the President legislated single-handedly via presidential decrees until a Parliament — dominated by his allies — was convened in 1978, but which still shared its legislative powers with him (as President AND Prime Minister) by virtue of Amendment Six.

The 1987 Constitution aimed to change all that by preventing a concentration of powers in one man or branch of government. Thus, the return to a tripartite system, with stricter separation of powers and checks and balances. Chief among them were an expanded power of judicial review, a much-enhanced Bill of Rights, and a system of accountability that was designed to be insulated against political expediency.

Now some senators, who are sworn to protect the Constitution, are the ones eroding the safeguards instituted by the framers thereof. The 2/3 supermajority for conviction in an impeachment trial, on the basis of ALL the members of the Senate, is an ironclad rule devised to prevent any dilution of the carefully-created balance of making removal by impeachment difficult, but not impossible.

By making the baseline number subject to circumstances other than the accepted means of removal from Senate membership would make ease or difficulty of a guilty verdict dependent on the whims of the powers-that-be.

Therefore, as in what is happening today, an Executive with a subservient Ombudsman could decimate the political Opposition in the Senate with arrests and threats in order to make it easier to convict its political opponent, or do the same in the future to make it impossible to convict an ally. Such a situation could not have been the intendment of the authors of our Fundamental Law.

Rigging the constitutional basis for an impeachment vote due to purely political expediencies would start us down a slippery slope from which we may no longer recover our legal footing.

The sweet spot to convict is 16. Less than that, without solid justification, would make the entire process sour.