Vice president

Right off the bat, let me categorically say that I am against the removal of the vice president from the line of succession to the presidency, as proposed in a provision in a draft federalism charter that the House of Representatives is crafting. And I am glad that the House eventually saw the folly and voted to scrap the controversial provision.

But what I find very interesting and instructive about the furor the controversial provision caused is that many of the most vocal and rapacious oppositors are opposing the provision not for the reason they should have opposed it but because they felt it was meant to make it possible for one politician to regain her old position at the expense of another.

Opposition congressmen saw in the provision a sinister plot to make it easier for former president and now Speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to regain the presidency should anything happen to President Duterte, instead of the succession passing on to Vice President Leni Robredo, with whom they are allied.

In other words, their opposition is not about legality, constitutionality, and logic but about political expediency. The political opposition, with Robredo already a life's breath away from the presidency, see themselves on the very brink of power and are not about to give that political advantage away.

I am not making this up. You know who the noisiest opposition congressmen are. You see them almost every day having their say on their favorite unbridledly biased television network. And all they talk about is that this is an Arroyo plot, authored by Arroyo herself, to deprive Robredo of her constitutional right to succeed Duterte if something happens to him.

None of them ever talks at length about legality, constitutionality, or even logic about the issue. I include logic as a concern because I cannot see why a nation would elect a vice president and not have whoever occupies the position included in the line of succession to the presidency. If the vice president cannot succeed, why not scrap the position altogether?

Moreover, in their haste to politicize the issue, the opposition congressmen forgot that the proposed charter cannot just do away with the existing Constitution just because the House of Representatives says so. For one thing, the Senate is not on board this initiative. For another, a federalism charter means nothing if the federalism concept itself is not understood by all.

Most Filipinos still do not know what federalism is all about. All we have been hearing are what the federalism experts say and what the anti-federalism experts counter them with. But if you go around to where the majority of the 110 million Filipinos are and ask as many as you can what they understand of the concept, you would be lucky to find seven.