Nerves

Today, Congress meets in historic joint session to pass upon the President’s declaration of Martial Law.

The exacting few who demand faithful conformity to the Constitutional script now have their consolation. At last, a Congressional check. The opposition Senators and Congressmen are palpably restless. A heaven sent opportunity to get their objections on record – and their pictures in the papers while at it!

Of course, this is all academic. Congress will grant the extension. Even its mystifying five-month duration is already a fait accompli. But surely this carte blanche mentality is not the critical role the 1986 Constitutional Commission envisioned for Congress. Neither did they dream of an invocation of judicial restraint and benefit of the doubt concessions. Not from the very institution relied upon to have the nerve for that all important role of verifying the sufficiency of the factual bases for the exercise of this fearsome power.

One thing is for certain: this is not the spirit in which the Constitutional provision was meant to be understood.

What nerve!. It must have been a logistical nightmare to have our President plunk himself down in a military camp in Marawi dangerously close to the hostilities. But they pulled it off without a hitch.

No way is this a PR stunt. My late father, Chairman of the Senate Committee on National Defense in the late 1980s, made it his mission to visit the military camps, specially the ones farthest from the cities and nearest geographically and strategically to danger. Like a local Bob Hope/USO, Manong Ernie would arrive on board the same military transports – whether Huey, Truck or Amphibian – bearing gifts (combat boots were always in short supply) and in the company of courageous superstar entertainers like Ali Sotto, Dulce and Claire de la Fuente. This was his and their way of giving back and thanking the men in the actual combat arena for their sacrifices.

The President’s bravura succeeded in lifting the morale of the soldiers who are now at the tail end of the 60-day campaign.

Nervous. Thank you to Senators Mary Grace Poe and Joseph Victor Ejercito for the brokered détente that will postpone the carnage of colorum cars on July 26. This is clearly a win-win situation for the riding public and the TCNs and TNVS. And even if it should be a patent loss in terms of tax revenue foregone, government also gains from having satisfied commuters. 

But this is a short term solution. Government should try to deal faster with the myriad concerns that the advent of better technology has brought.

There are more than 40 thousand pending applications – this is also known as regulatory nightmare. Estimates of the commissions made by the TCNs go as high as P7 Million daily to as low as operating at a loss. Novel problems confound ill equipped bureaucrats – how to deal with the phenomenon called “surge pricing”? The traditional public utility vehicles are also insisting on their own crackdown moratoriums.  And it doesn’t help that our government issue clerical desk drawers must have been pre-owned by stage magicians who used them to make items disappear – like the missing UBER and GRAB accreditation applications.

Unnerved. Our armchair analysis on Speaker Alvarez’s proposals on Marriage Reform elicited quite a few reactions, pro and con. But a preponderance of responses reveal the enduring sentiments of the Filipino in favor of the institution. 

The arguments to abandon the traditional family and marriage are not new, but the brazen claim that what is abnormal should be normal is unfortunately widespread. That an increasing number of Filipinos are embarrassed of our Nation’s status as marriage’s last refuge points to a failure to educate the next generations in being “proud” to do what is right, no matter how unpopular. “Gaya-gaya” has never been considered a positive Filipino trait. 

Study after study in varied disciplines prove that in cases of dissolutions, it is often the women and children who bear the cost. There are, of course, legitimate reasons to separate. We have annulments for that. But, divorce, which always gives way to no-fault divorce has had far-reaching and negative consequences in every society that embraced it.

As for the argument that we are the only holdouts aside from the Vatican?   The answer to that is what every Filipino mom tells her kid who argues that all his friends are doing (whatever) except for him: “Eh ano, kung lahat sila ay naghahanap ng batong ipupokpok sa ulo, ikaw rin?” If at all, in so far as we are a Christian country, that attitude of embarrassment is self-hating, and anti-Christian.

If Congress is going to debate this, then let them recognize that the legal order ultimately is supposed to advance the moral order and not subvert it. Let them debate this and all other issues on hard facts, and not on appeals to emotion with the so-called hard cases and exceptions. Because hard cases make for bad laws and it defies logic to make what is an exception the general rule for all.

Madame Cojones. The first woman Secretary of State of the United States dropped by last Wednesday to remind us (we needed reminding?) of how much more agreeable it would be to live under a regime where the rule of law predominates. Credible advice from a leader who walked that talk during her tenure as the highest ranking female official in the history of the US Government. 

Kudos to ANC not only for their magnificent choice of Speaker (Madame Albright earned her M.A. and PhD degrees from Columbia University) but also for their adept handling of this leadership forum on Global governance and world economy.