Do average Juans even care?

How can anyone argue against change, particularly if it is genuinely intended to serve the country’s and the people’s interests?

That’s precisely why the Senate, earlier this month, filed Resolution of Both Houses 6, its own version of a similar measure that was authored by House Speaker Martin Romualdez and adopted by the Lower Chamber in March 2023.

The House’s version of Resolution of Both Houses No. 6 calls for a hybrid constitutional convention that would propose amendments to the economic provisions of the Constitution.

Romualdez was very clear about the House’s RBH 6’s purpose, that is, to rewrite the Charter’s restrictive economic provisions to enable the country to attract more foreign investments.

On 15 January 2024, Senate President Miguel Zubiri filed the Senate’s own RBH 6 which, according to him, was the result of his meetings with Speaker Romualdez and the latter’s cousin, President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr., who had asked the Senate to take the lead in starting the process of amending the Constitution’s economic provisions.

“He said, ‘why doesn’t the Senate take the lead in the discussions of the economic provisions and then you approve your version which the House can adopt?’ That was the President’s position,” Zubiri said.

The President, according to Zubiri, had also stressed that taking the “People’s Initiative” route towards Charter change was “too divisive.” Already reports were spreading about how people in the provinces were being bribed with as low as P100 for their signature in support of a People’s Initiative.

Per Zubiri, a week before he filed the Senate’s RBH 6, the President underscored that “dati akong senador (at) bilang dating senador, hindi din ako papayag na ma-diminish ang kapangyarihan ng Senado pagdating sa usapin ng bicameralism (I used to be a senator and as a former senator, I will not allow the diminution of the Senate’s power when it comes to the issue of bicameralism).”

A subcommittee to be chaired by Senator Sonny Angara was supposed to have been created to start discussions on the proposed Charter amendments. Such discussions, slated in January, were targeted to be finished by March.

On 17 January, the Commission on Elections said signatures from 300 areas pertaining to constitutional reform through a People’s Initiative had been submitted to their offices in cities and municipalities from the Cordilleras to the Bangsamoro region.

Five days later, on 22 January, Senator Ronald dela Rosa hurled allegations that Romualdez had ordered House members to gather signatures for a People’s Initiative campaign.

Dela Rosa’s charges jibed with talk of local government execs distributing petition forms and paying off people for their signatures.

The following day, amid Senator Joel Villanueva’s statement that many of his colleagues no longer saw the point in passing the Senate’s RBH 6 after learning that several House members’ aides were behind the nationwide campaign to collect people’s signatures, a manifesto was unanimously signed by the senators.

In their manifesto, the senators slammed the House for its duplicity in seeking Charter change by taking the PI route after initially agreeing to a constitutional convention.

Senators, including Deputy Majority Leader JV Ejercito, challenged Romualdez to speak up and quash the PI after he had been identified — rightly or wrongly — as being behind the signature campaign by Dela Rosa.

Romualdez instead defended the PI, saying that it is a “direct expression of the will of the people, providing a means for citizens to propose constitutional amendments.”

For his part, Albay 2nd District Representative Joey Salceda claimed in a radio interview on 24 January that the number of signatures collected — some eight million — already exceeded 12 percent of the total number of registered voters. “For the first time in our lives, why don’t we listen to the people?” he asked.

The people? Or those who paid the people for their signatures?

A Pulse Asia survey on 15-19 March last year showed that 45 percent of respondents were not in favor of Charter change versus 41 percent who were. Likewise, the number of Filipinos with scant or no knowledge at all of the Constitution increased from 73 percent to 79 percent.

More recent was the OCTA Research survey on 10-14 December 2023 of 1,200 respondents the majority of whom — 73 percent — said they saw the high prices of consumer goods as “the most urgent national concern for adult Filipinos,” followed by employment and wage issues.

Pointed out OCTA Research, “changing the Constitution is not an urgent concern of adult Filipinos.” In fact, it said, “only one percent of respondents identified it as a priority concern.”