“IN CASE a vacancy arises by reason of removal, resignation, permanent incapacity or death of the incumbent President, the incumbent Senate President shall act as President until a President shall have been chosen and qualified.”
So, it was stipulated under Section 4, Article XVII, on the Transitory Provision of Resolution of Both Houses (of Congress) No. 15 authored by former president House Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and 21 other legislators.
The Office of the Vice President thereby, by the stroke of a pen, totally reduced to the lamentation of America’s first VP, John Adams, thus: “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”
The haste with which Vice President Leni Robredo is being taken out of the order of succession, displays as much the hatred as the fear of the Duterte administration and its cohorts of Robredo.
In more instances than once had Duterte expressed his contempt of the vice president, badmouthing her every turn he gets, going to the extent of making the impossible wish for already-defeated-for-vice president-but-still-protesting Junior Ferdinand Marcos as preferred successor.
Truly, that truism holds: One hates most what he fears most.
Getting Robredo out of the succession process in the interregnum between the old charter to a new one is all-too revealing: Of the frailties and foibles of the Duterte regime that have to be kept under wraps by a sympathetic successor. Of the real state of unhealth of Duterte himself.
Why this sudden rush to federalism after it was backburnered in the wake of Mocha Uson’s pepepededede- pepepe-dedede-ralismo stupidity?
A sense of foreboding there.
