Conclusion

ConCom Commissioner Ricardo Romulo explained that the 1987 Constitution was ‘neither conservative nor radical; rather it is progressive’ and ‘lays the seeds for a significant breakthrough in the areas of poverty, human rights, people power, government reform and economic progress’.^[865] Commissioner Edmundo Garcia expounded that while the charter is ‘a compromise document’, it nevertheless ‘provides the ground for our people to pursue unfinished quests and projects in different arenas of future political struggles’, including:

electoral contests, pressure politics exerted on parliamentary actions and the political will of the executive, the tasks of building people’s organizations and political parties, the parliament of the streets...

Similarly, while Commissioner Ponciano Bennagen acknowledged that the charter ‘carries the potential for the restoration of the old iniquitous social order, he said that the country’s political future will ultimately depend upon the efforts of the citizenry:

The attainment of a Philippine utopia envisioned in the Preamble as well as in the relevant sections would finally depend on how the broad masses of the Filipino people - meaning, the peasants, workers, urban poor, youth and students, indigenous cultural communities, women and other nationalist and democratic forces - participate in the struggle.^[867]

The Constitution will play a key role in this struggle, said Bennagen. If government betrays the goals of the Revolution,

we could foresee people taking to the streets in the picket lines once more, with greater vigor and in greater numbers, and to be sure, they will draw lessons and inspiration from earlier struggles, including the triumphant February revolution.^[868]

If this happens, then ‘the people would need a modicum of guarantee of their civil, political and human rights’.^[869] This the Constitution gives them in the form of ‘[t]he Bill of Rights and other sections supportive of democratic actions, includ­ing ‘the provisions respecting and protecting the right of people’s organization^] to participate in decision-making’, and ‘those provisions on initiative, plebiscite, referenda and recall’.^[870]

The 1987 Constitution therefore gives the ‘people and people’s organization^’]’ a crucial role in continuing the ‘struggle for human development and liberation’ which the revolutionary democratic idea of people power promises.^[871] In doing so it follows Publius’s age old wisdom that a ‘dependence on the people’ is ‘the primary control on the government’, and constitutional institutions such as the separation of powers and judicial review are mere ‘auxiliary precautions’.^[872] Unfortunately, the continued predominance of both judicialised governance and Schumpeter’s model of elite democracy as the frameworks for interpreting the 1987 Philippine Constitution has thwarted the fulfillment of this revolutionary, constitutionally enshrined idea.^[873]

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