Tag: federalism

Illegal and extra-constitutional #RevGov

August 22, 2020 by
I

Just some quick notes here.

1. The people advocating a revolutionary government are in effect calling for a self-coup, or an “autogolpe” in Spanish, where a legitimately elected leader illegally dissolves the other branches of government and assumes extraordinary powers for himself.

2. A power grab is a power grab, regardless of who the beneficiary is. Remember that a President is not the same as the government. Government is a balancing of the powers of the three branches of government—the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary. The different branches are supposed to act as checks and balances for each other.

If, and that is a big IF, a President accedes to the proposal and declares a revolutionary government and dissolves the legislature and controls the judiciary, that is still clearly a power grab.

“A RevGov could also happen if the insiders—the people in actual and constitutional control of the government actively assisted by the military (or the military officials themselves)—set aside the constitution, sweep out the incumbent officials, install new ones, and run the government according to their will and ways,” warned former SC Justice Artemio Panganiban in 2017, when President Duterte was still openly flirting with the possibility of declaring a revgov.

Since then, Duterte seems to have dropped the idea.