Once in a while, ideas like this come rises to the top:
Eligibility is not determined by popularity, first of all. There have been scads of unknown politicians who made it onto the ballot because they met the requirements for running for office. That fact alone should be enough to settle the question.
Where popularity makes a difference is in the candidate’s winnability. Winnability, however, is something so far outside the COMELEC’s sphere of influences it’s not even in the same ballpark.
Equally significant to the point this gentleman is trying to make, the Commission on Elections does not prescribe the qualifications for holding office. It’s the law that does that.
And just to take that point to its logical next step, no, it’s not the COMELEC that passes laws either; Congress does that. Any dissatisfaction with existing prescribed qualifications for holding any public office, therefore, are more properly addressed to that august body, not the COMELEC.
And speaking of logical progressions:
https://twitter.com/citizennacho/status/812511122779574272
If you were to believe the COMELEC a lame duck, then you’d be ignoring the fact that top-level rule making authority in a republican government – such as the Philippines’ – was purposely designed to be be highly centralised in Congress. That’s the very point of having three separate co-equal branches of government. The Legislature makes the laws and holds the purse; the Executive carries out the laws; and the Judiciary constantly checks to see that the two other branches stay within the limits of their respective powers.
The COMELEC may be an independent Constitutional body, and as such may seem to exist outside this tripartite arrangement, but it’s independence is not without limitation; it must still conform to the laws, and it cannot make up new laws just because it feels like it.
Take campaign spending limits, for instance.
For the longest time, the COMELEC understood that the campaign spending limits provided for by current laws were unrealistic and only predisposed candidates to breaking the law and concealing their violations. In other words, rather than promote compliance, the law actually encouraged violation. So, the COMELEC went to Congress and asked for the legislature to amend the campaign spending limits.
Just before the 2016 elections, a couple of good legislative proposals came out of the appropriate Congressional committees and, assuming continuity, that means we’re well on the way to seeing the old campaign spending limits being amended.
Until such amendments are actually made into law, however, the COMELEC literally cannot use even the proposed limits in place of the ones currently in the law books. If it did, the Supreme Court would have no choice but to strike that initiative down for being in violation of law – no matter how much more logical the new, albeit arbitrary, limits might be.
The same goes for the qualifications of candidates.
We can argue until Judgement Day that people need to do this or pass that test or whatever, before they can be considered eligible to run for office. And all those new criteria might make perfect sense, but if they’re not in the law, then they cannot be enforced by the COMELEC.
This is not lameness, this is simply the system working as it should.
Yes, unfortunately, this system also often works at a pace that would make turtles look like sportscars. So obviously, changes have to be made. But again, any change sought must be accomplished within the framework of how government works. It’s almost tautological, but – short of there being a revolution – it is what it is.
A Thought Experiment
Let’s say, however, that we could ignore the niceties of “how government works.” Let’s say, as a thought experiment, that the COMELEC could do exactly what people tend to wish for. How would that pan out?
“COMELEC should require candidates to pass drug tests” – oh, wait. This one doesn’t have to be an experiment. COMELEC tried to do this once and got smacked down by the Supreme Court. Look it up.
“COMELEC should declare this candidate or that candidate a nuisance because news someone claims they did this or that” – If the COMELEC were to step outside the legally mandated parameters of a declaration of nuisancy (parameters which were actually made even more restrictive by a recent Supreme Court decision) so that it could respond to allegations of disqualifying behaviour, then the COMELEC would be exercising the power to thin out the field of candidates the people can choose from.
So say, for instance, the particularly noisy group called the Democratic Independent Coalition for Kapayapan agitated for Candidate X to be disqualified because he said something like the Philippines should become a nuclear-armed country. If the COMELEC did that – because obviously, such a policy would run counter to the Constitution – DICK would love the COMELEC, right? And hail it as a stalwart guardian of democracy.
But then, DICK’s candidate Y goes on the record and says only legitimate rape can be prosecuted criminally. The COMELEC must then unilaterally act to disqualify Y as well, because he obviously lacks mental capacity, wouldn’t DICK cry foul?
Of course it would. And it’d be right to do so too. But then, of course, having advocated the same treatment against one candidate, DICK would have to be ready to accept a dose of the same medicine. Note, of course, that the consequences of a tit-for-tat application is only the shallowest argument that can be made against the COMELEC having this sort of power.
“COMELEC should not allow people to run simply because they are popular” – To make this happen, COMELEC must determine, on its own authority, when to ignore the qualifications set out by law, who is running on the strength of popularity alone, and then decide – again on it’s own say-so – to deprive that candidate’s supporters of the right to have the person of their choice run for public office. Not to mention depriving the candidate himself of his Constitutional right to stand for election.
The proposed “power” of COMELEC, therefore, boils down to the COMELEC having the authority to (1) unilaterally substitute it’s own wisdom for that of the Constitution, which was ratified by the Filipino people; (2) unilaterally make the entirely subjective decision on whether a person is fit for office or not; and (3) to unilaterally limit the options available to the voting public. If that happens, the COMELEC will then have transitioned from being an independent Constitutional Commission “charged with enforcing all laws related to elections,” to a dictatorial junta.
We could go on and on in this vein, but it’ll all boil down to the same thing. If the COMELEC acts outside the boundaries of existing laws, those acts will not just be invalid and void, they will also be prone to partisan abuse and will ultimately lead to the shrinking of the people’s democratic power. Or, if you were to condense all of that into a single word: dictatorship.
And no one wants that, right? *cough*
That some politicians are in power right now does boggle the imagination. But the bottom line is, that’s how a democracy works. Every single person will have an opinion about a politician and those opinions will not always agree with the opinions of the other people who voted for that politician. This does not necessarily make them stupid and you, smart. And if the COMELEC is to remain a viable referee in the electoral game, it cannot take part in that argument.
COMELEC must remain true to the existing laws that govern a person’s eligibility to run for office, regardless of how loudly naysayers howl. Beyond that, what the COMELEC can do is to not turn a blind eye or a deaf ear to those howls. In the event that the COMELEC sees a need for change, whether because it was brought up by a dissatisfied public or as a result of it’s continuous efforts to fine-tune the electoral system, it can – and has done so on many occasions – bring it up with Congress.
Know Elections Better, Superfriends (use the hashtag #KEBS) is an initiative of the Commission on Elections – Education and Information Department (COMELEC-EID) intended to increase the public’s comprehension of how the electoral system works.