It is common knowledge that the Constitution is the highest law of the land.

It is common sense that any amendment on the highest law of the land would put way too many things at stake.

It could lengthen the term of an unjust ruler, it could make us prone to abuses by the military and the police, it could rob us of the rights and liberties that many of us couldn’t seem to care about at the moment simply because we have never experienced being deprived of them just yet and therefore we operate on the belief that any notion of how it is without them are purely hypothetical, or so most people would want to put it nowadays.

Since the Duterte Administration took flight in 2016, it has been pushing for a Charter Change. While it is not the first administration to ever push for changes in the constitution, its motives are still just as dubious.  Any person capable of critical thinking would know that lawmakers and the nation’s leaders would want to design the constitution according to their convenience and however they fancy.

It is always the same story, self-serving leaders wanting to tailor-fit the laws on them instead of straightening their morals and motives to fit to the law. What’s hilarious is that this administration wants to make changes in the constitution like as if it actually matters to them what’s written on it when in fact, they have already skirted around our supreme laws for countless instances.

Right now, the administration and its allies are pushing for a Constitutional Assembly, whereas a number of the members of the opposition push for a Constitutional Convention.

Both are processes that will arrive on a Charter Change (Trivia: under the current constitution, there are three modes of which it could be amended. Con-Con and Con-Ass, and the less talked about “People’s initiative), between the two, there are small differences that could create a really big impact.

In a Constitutional Convention, delegates are either elected or appointed by the people; thereby there will be careful sifting. In a Constitutional Assembly, members of the Congress (both House of Representatives and the Senate) will convene and come up with a vote, the whole Congress need only to have 3/4 of its total members back a proposed amendment and that is it.

With the House of Representatives being filled with Duterte allies, and our Senators’ stance becoming irrelevant in a Constitutional Assembly, would we really entrust the fate of our nation in such a process?

With the stances taken by the House of Representatives on the reducing of Commission on Human Rights’ annual budget to 1000 pesos, on the extrajudicial killings, and the impeachment of Chief Justice Sereno among others, do they even exhibit integrity and moral ascendancy?

While a Constitutional Assembly is cheaper and faster, the stakes are too high for us to even worry about the cost.

Now isn’t the time to be cheapskates./WDJ