DERAILING THE CHECKS AND BALANCES

       

Early on in his term, President Bongbong Marcos is already antagonizing a co-equal branch of government, the legislature, by ordering his Executive Secretary Vic Dominguez to snub the invitation to attend a Senate inquiry on the sugar importation mess.

This does not bode well for a vibrant democratic system. Under our scheme of government, each of the three branches (executive, legislative and judicial) has the additional and important function of checking and balancing the exercise of powers by the other in what is known as “checks and balances.”   

The Constitution enumerates the several ways each branch exercises this function. For example, the president as head of the executive branch has the power to veto any law passed by Congress; the legislative branch, through the Senate, must ratify a treaty negotiated and signed by the president with another country before it becomes binding; the judicial branch, particularly the Supreme Court, has the power to invalidate the actions of both the executive and legislative branches by declaring them unlawful.

The conduct of legislative inquiries is one of the powers of Congress to aid it in crafting legislations. Legislative inquiries help Congress pass new laws or amend existing ones to address a particular problem, such as the current sugar shortage. To be sure, this function has been abused several times by scheming legislators to drag before them and publicly flail public officials they deride or to grandstand on a particular issue without the least intention of crafting a law from the exercise.

Given the importance of the sugar shortage crisis, however, the executive must cooperate with Congress in getting into the bottom of the problem so that a solution can be found. Bongbong’s directive to Secretary Dominguez not to attend the Senate inquiry is an alarming indication of his disrespect to a co-equal branch of government, which forebodes an authoritarian tendency on his part.

We all know what happened under Ferdinand Marcos, Sr.’s rule when he started acting as the executive and legislative at the same time and controlled the judiciary. Hopefully Marcos, Jr. is not trying to follow this playbook in snubbing the Senate.