Dynasty pathogens

To put a fashionable spin on it, if Filipino political dynasties were rogue AI (artificial intelligence) bots, the Supreme Court just recently confined them again to a “sandbox.”

An AI “sandbox,” as journalist Jill Lepore colorfully describes it, is “a bounded test area without direct internet access, like pathogens secured in a lab.”

Likening dynasties to pathogens is appropriate, too. Numerous studies show political dynasties, optimizing their power and wealth, are superbugs in our body politic, doing things they are supposedly forbidden to do.

And, as with the humans desperately shackling AI agents with software “harnesses” inside the “sandbox” to prevent abuse, the 1987 Constitution similarly fit “harnesses” on political dynasties.

But as things have turned out, political dynasties escaped the “sandbox.”

If Congress didn’t allow political dynasties to escape, the SC wouldn’t have called it out in its unanimous 26 August ruling for committing a “culpable violation of its duty” to enact an anti-political dynasty law the last 39 years — thereby proving the SC’s charge that Congress committed a “grave abuse of discretion.”

Concentrating political power in only a few families has distorted “democracy, weakening accountability and fostering conditions conducive to corruption and political patronage,” the High Court said.

But not only did the Court slam Congress’ self-interested avoidance of its constitutional duty, the High Tribunal even proclaimed higher hurdles in any law prohibiting dynasties.

The SC demanded that the scope of the congressional bills banning dynasties must extend up to the fourth civil degree of familial and spousal relations.

As matters now stand, the House of Representatives passed on 3 June a bill “that seeks to bar spouses and relatives of up to only the second degree of consanguinity from holding elective posts at the same time,” said a news report.

The Senate, meanwhile, has a counterpart bill, now on second reading, that defines “relatives” running for and in public office “within the second civil degree of consanguinity or affinity, whether legitimate or illegitimate, full or half-blood.”

Critics of the pending anti-dynasty legislation say the House bill essentially “legitimizes” dynasties since it does not prevent family members from simultaneously occupying different positions in a locality.

“Key provisions of the approved House bill allow spouses and relatives to run for representative at the same time as long as they are in different districts and belong to different party-lists, and also to seek various posts in the barangay, municipal and provincial levels as long as there is no sitting family member there,” said a news report.

The Senate version, on the other hand, is apparently “more progressive” since it supposedly not only bars the simultaneous holding of positions but also the immediate succession of a current office holder.

Given the obvious clash of provisions, the question is: What now? Whichever way the ball rolls, there will be legal and constitutional implications, and among those implications would probably be a separation of powers conflict.

This will happen since the judiciary cannot directly write an anti-dynasty law. The Constitution leaves the specific definition and scope, “as may be defined by law,” to the legislature.

But if Congress wholly defies the SC’s mandamus order, this could lead to an institutional standoff over the limits of judicial power versus legislative discretion, especially the complex political questions regarding the non-elected SC’s judicial overreach.

But for the moment, one issue is clear: without an anti-political dynasty law anytime soon, we’ll still be in the hospital, grievously ill with the pathogens Filipino political dynasties unleashed.