Light at the tunnel's end: Reviving Cha-Cha

JUST when the Centrist Democrats, particularly the Centrist Democratic Party (CDP), were losing hope at the end of former president Rodrigo Duterte's term when he dropped the ball on constitutional revisions, we had our expectations revived with the pronouncements of Sen. Robin Padilla who topped the Senate race on a platform championing "federalism and parliamentary government" and his mantra of welcoming foreign direct investments (FDI). As always, Filipinos love populist candidates adopting trendy but complicated issues — stabbing in the eye the snobbish 20 to 30 percent of the citizenry who dismisses the good senator for being a "mere actor" incapable of understanding or following through on issues that require heated debates on the Senate floor in the language of the cognoscenti — English — not in the vernacular which most senators are incapable of speaking or are plain incompetent in.

It was a sad memory for our citizenry that one of the major cogs preventing discussions and debates on constitutional reform was the erstwhile Senate chairman of the Committee on Constitutional Amendments — then senator Francis Pangilinan, who since 2019 sat on various constitutional amendments. He had to kowtow to the Liberal Party line upon the ascendancy of the then lamented President Benigno Aquino 3rd who declared that nary a "comma or a word" be changed in his mother's 1987 Constitution.