Senator Imee Marcos took the Senate floor last Monday to sound the alarm about a dirty administration plot to scrap the 2028 elections and extend her brother’s term through charter change. The Constitution, sacred and inviolable, must be defended, she said. And in a moment of triumphalist inanity, Marcos rallied the public to rise in righteous indignation behind the majority bloc, which she called the “Great 13.” 

Why they refuse to call themselves the “Duterte 13” boggles the mind.

It was a speech that makes Duterte loyalists go weak in the knees. No-elections and term extensions are the latest talking points from the troll farm, and the presidential sister tried to memorialize it in the chamber’s records for posterity. For the rest of the nation, it was just another day in the Duterte household, otherwise known as the Cayetano Senate, better known as “Bahay ni Tatay” featuring some housemates who grow more theatrical and nutty with each session.

What Senator Marcos conveniently left out is a rather inconvenient history. 

Duterte’s aggressive push

During the Duterte presidency, the administration and the House of Representatives pushed aggressively for charter change through a constituent assembly, complete with proposals to scrap the 2019 midterm elections and extend the terms of incumbent officials, including then-President Rodrigo Duterte who will serve for an undetermined transition period. These political revisions were necessary, they said, to advance Duterte’s federalism agenda.  

The House and the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) embarked on a nationwide roadshow, rallying key sectors behind federalism and cha-cha, placing full-page newspaper ads, and making the case that federalism was the instant cure to chronic poverty and underdevelopment. The Senate, to its credit, refused to play along. Undeterred, the House floated the option of convening a constituent assembly without the Senate. 

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. But rather than shelve the Cha-Cha agenda, its proponents doubled down. Reports surfaced of DILG memorandums directing regional offices and allied sectoral groups to continue gathering signatures for Charter amendments even during the lockdown. The target was two million signatures for submission to Congress before the State of the Nation Address in July 2020.

The local governments secretary neither confirmed nor denied the memos. The officials who signed the memos claimed they did it on their own. Malacañang predictably called it fake news. And in language eerily familiar to anyone who has seen Duterte operators at work, then-Speaker Alan Peter Cayetano said Cha-Cha was “not a priority,” the same phrase he used before gutting ABS-CBN’s franchise and fast-tracking the Anti-Terror Law.

The proposal to postpone the midterm elections and extend the terms of all incumbent officials was not a fringe idea floated by some congressmen. It was a recurring feature of the Duterte-era Cha-Cha push, resurrected at every opportunity and repackaged with fresh justifications: first federalism, then the pandemic. These were necessary “surgical” amendments to address urgent needs. The justifications may have changed but the goal remained the same.

Selective truth

A Pulse Asia survey showed dismally low public support for Duterte’s charter change agenda. Malacañang’s response was basically to blame the public for being insufficiently educated, even as its own taxpayer-funded education roadshow had failed spectacularly to move the needle.

So when Senator Marcos rose to denounce charter change as a sinister administration plot, she is not speaking truth to power. She is speaking truth selectively trimmed to exclude six years of the Duterte administration doing precisely what she now claims to oppose. The personalities she now stands with in “principled” opposition are the same personalities who once enthusiastically supported it.

This is not a warning about the present administration’s intentions to revise the charter, for obviously there is none. It is a warning about the future.

Should Vice President Sara Duterte win the presidency in 2028, brace yourselves. The Cha-Cha and term extension agenda — shelved, not abandoned — will be reanimated with fresh urgency. And leading the charge, in all likelihood, will be some of the very people performing outrage about it today. – Rappler.com

Joey Salgado is a former journalist, and a government and political communications practitioner. He served as spokesperson for former vice president Jejomar Binay.