Anything Under the Sun
Presidential versus Parliamentary
In this issue we are starting a series on Charter-Change (Cha-cha) which we believe the people should be well-informed in order to vote intelligently should there be a ratification on the proposed amendments.
The main recommendation of the Constitutional commission is the shift from the presidential to the parliamentary form of government.
To this writer, who is a former professor on Constitutional Law and political sciences at the University of San Agustin, the best way to understand the proposed parliamentary system is to compare it with our present one - presidential system.
The chief distinction between the two is that the presidential system is based on the separation of power while the parliamentary is on the union of powers.
Under our presidential form, there are three main departments in the government - the legislative (Congress) which makes the law, the executive (President) which enforces the law and the judiciary (courts) which interprets the law.
This system was first advocated by Montesquieu in his Spirit of Laws as a formula to create democracy in answer to his time's state of governance where the governmental power of making, enforcing and interpreting the law was vested in a single person - the king or the emperor.
Under our present presidential system, the legislative department is Congress composed of the upper chamber (House of the Senate) and lower chamber house (House of Representatives). The executive department is the President assisted by his Cabinet. The judiciary department is the Supreme Court plus the lower courts.
These three departments are co-equal and independent of each other. No one is above the other two. As a general rule, no one can interfere with the functions of the other two.
The rationale of this is to prevent the concentration of governmental powers in the hands of a single person like King Louis XIV of France who said "I am the State".
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SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: The first set of five booklets (Books 1 to 5) of West Visayas Beautiful and Wonderful, authored by this writer is now available for P500 at his office address at No. 4, Santa Ana St., Molo, Iloilo City 5000. We are starting the second set (Books 6 to 10) this January.