What's with emergency powers?

There has got to be something terribly wrong with the presidency in this country if every time a daunting problem comes up someone suddenly proposes to give the president emergency powers to solve it. Even more curiously, it is almost always not the president who asks for such powers. In the latest case, it is Anak Kalusugan partylist Rep. Mike Defensor who wants emergency powers for President Duterte to solve the PhilHealth mess.

Most well-adjusted persons have come to accept that for as long as one lives, there will never be an end to problems. Some are easy and some are difficult. But ordinarily, most people get to solve their problems with their own means. Sometimes problems get solved in a snap and sometimes they require more patience and more time.

But as they say, we are never given a problem we cannot solve. Now the presidency is the most powerful office in any land. The presidency may be called other names in other places, but there is no mistaking who a nation's leader is. It is always he, or she, who has the biggest voice and carries the biggest stick.

For all that power and influence, people would kill to be president. They would spend huge amounts of money to help secure a win in an election. A president is not only president, he is commander-in-chief. He appoints justices, he approves the budget. When he walks through a crowd, even cardinals step aside.

So how come someone like Mike Defensor, no stranger to some power himself as a member of that privileged circle of citizens called congressmen, would now be asking for emergency powers for President Duterte so he can solve the PhilHealth problem? It is not as if the nation is asking Duterte to go to war with China or some other close-to-impossible task. He is just being asked to whip PhilHealth into line.

Now there can never be any belittling of the PhilHealth problem. An agency that allows members to grow old up to 130 years on official records must clearly be getting eaten alive from the inside by maggots. It has to take a certain type to be able to wrestle that problem to the ground. But that is why we have a president. The leader of an entire nation should not find one problematic agency too hot to handle as to require emergency powers.

In fact Duterte never asked for any. It is just Defensor talking. But such talk should promptly be nipped in the bud. The Philippines is a country of very impressionable people. It is a dangerous place to start an idea. You start selling barbecue and the next day the entire street is full of barbecue vendors. Look what happened when two wives, trapped by quarantine, started swapping plants.

So let us kill this crazy idea being toyed with by Mike Defensor of giving President Duterte emergency powers just to straighten out the PhilHealth mess. Duterte is not president for nothing. He won by an overwhelming mandate. And he remains hugely popular despite the usual noise from the political opposition. No need for emergency powers. Duterte just has to be himself, both as the man and as the president.