Category: grace poe

Grace #Halalan2022

Katrina Stuart Santiago

Talking 2022 means talking about the elephant in the room that is Grace Poe.

It is clear to anyone who has a sense of how elections are won and lost, who has as starting point Duterte-Marcos’s massive propaganda machinery, who looks at surveys critically vis a vis one’s own political biases, that the only way to win this is to bring together the business sector, the middle classes, and the mass vote behind one candidate.

It was clear, since the 2019 Senatorial election results, that this would be Grace.

And no, you’re not talking to a Grace Poe fan. Search through this site and my social media accounts and you’ll see that I have had the worst opinions of her in terms of where she stands on oligarchs, at the same time that I have been impressed by how she takes the side of the transport sector and commuters in the Senate inquiries she’s led. This doesn’t make me two-faced. It makes HER a Senator, and it makes me a citizen who agrees as much as I might disagree with the people in power.

But that IS the thing isn’t it? The right to vote is tied to a sense of our responsibility to nation, not to the people we vote into positions of power. We are not their fans, or their followers; positions of power aren’t Facebook Pages or Twitter accounts. This is about citizenship and about having a sense of what nation needs at any given point, relative to the decisions that our leaders make for us, in our names, using our funds, regardless of whether we voted for them or not.

No one seems to see this anymore, and this is no surprise. Duterte propaganda has pushed even the most sane, most rational among us to turn to fanaticism and troll discourse, which is easy to fall prey to on social media, where people across Left to Liberal leanings have enjoyed deeper echo chambers. Yes, you will get leaders, from VP Leni to Makabayan talking about uniting the opposition, but none of that matters when their actors are first to engage in divisive, DDS-like behavior on public platforms.

Liberal actors throw around labels like “enabler” and “trapo” forgetting that we can list down as many from the Liberal side who are both, but more importantly failing to realize that this WILL NOT TRANSLATE to votes for VP Leni. It also only reminds us of the Liberals’ false purity politics and the moral highground that defined the elitism of the PNoy years.

The Liberals and the Ka Leody side have also discredited “winnability” as an important part of choosing a candidate on our side. This is silly. Yes, winnability and surveys shouldn’t play such an important part in who is encouraged to run. But are rules going to change just because you put up a losing candidate? Of course not. In fact putting up a candidate that is sure to lose serves Duterte-Marcos and no one else. Putting up a losing candidate is playing right into the hands of Duterte-Marcos, because they are experts at playing this electoral game and using the rules to their advantage.

You want to change the rules, you work on changing it six years before the next Presidential election. There’s no changing it with eight months to go.

Troll discourse, divisive behavior, discrediting winnability, and refusing to work from election data and facts, have been what we’ve lived with all of 2021. It was clear to me in May that unity was impossible, not with this set of actors that were leading the way, and no matter 1Sambayan trying to hide its liberal convictions (anyone with half a brain could tell this was a liberal formation from a mile away).

The social media noise and clutter, the culture of cancelling and trolling on our side, has led us to this point. It has led us to Lacson-Sotto, two (dirty?) old men who are classier, dignified versions of Duterte, both conservative, both militaristic, both representative of a misogyny that we have had enough of the past six years. It has led us to Isko Moreno who, for all the good he has done in Manila and despite good speeches, sounds like nothing more but budget Duterte-Marcos in impromptu interviews: the masa I’m-Juan-dela-Cruz rhetoric ala Duterte with no depth or vision, combined with the clean, good looking, educated voice ala Marcos. Kuya Germs would be proud of this performance.

It has led us to this point when no one wants to admit anymore, that our biggest chances of winning 2022 versus Duterte-Marcos-Pacquiao would be to have a Grace Poe run. She who is conservative enough (Cojuangco-supported enough) to get business sector support; she who is kolehiyala enough to get the middle class vote; and she who is FPJ, Susan Roces, and Ang Probinsyano enough to get the masa vote. She who has shown us her mettle with how she has dealt with the Duterte government’s disrespect of our transport works and jeepney drivers. She who was only one of two people (the other was Senator Nancy Binay) who didn’t do a Duterte fist when the 2019 Senatorial winners were proclaimed.

She who is in surveys regardless of whether she campaigns or not.

If the goal is to beat Duterte-Marcos-Pacquiao. If the goal is a unity that goes beyond our echo chambers, that goes beyond our social class, that goes beyond our notions of who deserves this. If our focus is on who will win this with us who will not just be controlled by politicians and business (Pacquiao), that will not just sell our resources to China and kill us (Duterte), that will not just continue a legacy of violence and plunder (Marcos), that will not just be a variation of the misogyny and violence of Duterte (Isko-Lacson-Sotto), that will actually allow us our democratic rights to dialogue, protest, and freedoms back.

If the goal is to WIN this, so that we can finally really defeat the tyrants among us, Grace Poe is our saving grace.

Anyone else is a losing proposition, some more murderous than others. ***

Mar and Grace must speak out

… The two won a combined vote of 18.6 million compared to President Duterte’s 15.9 million (Santiago and Binay earned a paltry 6.7 million votes combined).

If Poe and Roxas speak out, Duterte may taunt them as losers. If he does, that’s all right, that’s his style. But having had a combined vote larger than Duterte’s, they’re in a position to call out the government to rein in the police.

We all – government supporters and dissenters – must work together to make sure the nation’s direction is righted before things deteriorate and all will be lost. We cannot afford to have another Marcosian nightmare that we had from 1965 to 1986.

This is not a call to arms, a coup d’etat, or another People Power uprising. Rather, this is a call for enlightenment, for discernment, for open-mindedness, and for unity.

Leandro DD Coronel

Grace’s China response

B00 Chanco

Frontrunner Grace Poe is usually well briefed by her panel of expert advisers. But the second debate revealed she needs a little more polish on how to respond to the China question. Not that there is a really good answer to how to respond to the regional bully, but a future president must show savvy that can elicit respect here and abroad.

Read on…

The Supreme Court and the Poe disqualification case

Raul V. Fabella

The Philippine public has been treated to many erudite and well-reasoned treatises on how the Supreme Court (SC) should decide on Senator Grace Poe’s disqualification case. The legal issues are either involved and lengthy or simple and open-and-shut depending on who is making the case. Should the SC display judicial restraint, follow precedents, and hew closely to the letter of the law? Or should it display judicial activism and blaze a new judicial trail in pursuit of some perhaps new principle of jurisprudence? The SC did display a considerable capacity for judicial activism in allowing Juan Ponce Enrile to post bail though the charge against him is legally and constitutionally non-bailable. The new principle of jurisprudence, “humanitarian grounds,” which law students now have to learn has no accepted definition and one can drive an oil tanker through its portals. Be that as it may, not being a lawyer myself, I’d rather leave that to the legal eagles.

The purpose of this piece is not how the SC “should have decided” on the Poe case but what could be expected from revealed SC decision making in general.

Three theories on the decision making of the SC are salient and competing (see, e.g., Pacelle, Curry, and Marshall, 2011): (a) the legal theory — that what governs SC decision making are no more and no less than legal precedents and the Constitution; (b) the attitudinal theory — that what governs the SC decision making are the substantive prior preferences and ideologies of the justices; (c) the strategic theory — that SC decision making is governed by strategic considerations, especially in relation to outside forces, say, the other branches, especially elected branches of government. The President, the Senate, and Lower House have the power to retaliate (as, for example, through the budget allocation) in case of open display of contempt. Granting Juan Ponce Enrile the right to post bail on an unbailable charge clearly violates the legal theory. It may be understood as flowing from ingrained preferences (or biases as sometimes it is called) or from strategic considerations (or future payoffs as sometime it is called).

Pacelle, Curry, and Marshall (2011) tried to compare how these three theories perform as explanatory (proxied) variables in actual decisions of the US Supreme Court. Their logit regressions showed that none of the three theories can be rejected as correlates of SC decisions. I prefer to dwell on the strategic motives for decision making.

What appears to be a salient instance of strategic decision making by the US Supreme Court occurred during the New Deal Era. Then-US President Franklin D. Roosevelt — frustrated by repeated rebuffs by the US Supreme Court of New Deal legislations — threatened in 1937 to emasculate the SC with his Court Reorganization Plan. Known also as Roosevelt’s court packing plan, it came in the form of the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937.

It sought to grant the President the power to appoint an additional justice of the Supreme Court for every member of the Supreme Court over the age of 70 and 6 months and up to a maximum of six new associate justices.

Since it was Congress — not the Constitution — that established the composition of the SC, it can recompose it. Soon after Roosevelt won a sweeping victory in November 1936, the SC decided 5-4 upholding a Washington minimum wage law which the New Deal (in keeping with the Keynesian view of putting purchasing power in the pockets of the poor) favored. The tie was broken by, of all people, Justice Owen Richards who had previously opposed New Deal legislations.

In 1938, Justice Harlan Fiske Stone opined in the US vs Carolene Products that the SC should show deference to the elected branches in matters involving economic policy though not in matters of civil rights and civil liberties. The SC seemed to have acted to ease the political pressure and protect its identity (exemplified by the court packing plan).

Although the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill never became law, the message seemed to have been heard loud and clear in the halls of the US SC. But that is the US SC. We are in the land of “only in the Philippines.”

The question is what strategic considerations bore on the SC’s decision on the Poe disqualification case? We may never know.

But consider that candidate Rodrigo R. Duterte has said he will cure every ill in three months. Although that is mostly campaign bluster, to accomplish within his term what he promises implies realistically that he becomes a dictator, which calls for a clash with — and eventual dismantling of — the Supreme Court.

If Poe was disqualified, it is likely that Duterte is the only alternative to Vice-President Jejomar C. Binay, Sr. whose own defense being “No court has found me guilty” fools nobody, let alone the SC justices. If Poe was not disqualified, she will likely win (she was still leading the polls as of March 6 despite the case hanging over her campaign) and the Supreme Court should feel safer in her hands than in either Duterte’s who will not stand judicial obstacle or Binay’s who will need to judicially extricate himself. That is one possible strategic motive bearing on the SC decision. There may be others.

And, of course, their own beliefs about the suitability of the candidates for president should be factored in. One thing is sure: Poe being allowed to run is nowhere near the judicial activism displayed in the doctrine of “humanitarian considerations.”

Raul V. Fabella the chairman of the Institute for Development and Econometric Analysis, a professor at the UP School of Economics, and a member of the National Academy of Science and Technology.