Philippine Constitutional Change: The way out?

This year opened with debates on how to change the Constitution - as President Arroyo
deftly warded off calls for her resignation by putting the spotlight on political reforms.
During the height of the political crisis in July 2005, Arroyo called for ‘the opening of the
great debate on Charter Change’ as the solution to the political gridlock besetting the
Philippine political system. Congressmen and local government officials heartily
supported the call for a move towards a unicameral parliamentary government to replace
the current presidential system. The Senators, meanwhile, were vehement in their
opposition to the proposal, which would entail abolishing the Senate.

Changing the Charter has been a long-running debate in post-1986 Philippines, with all
Presidents since Fidel Ramos making it part of their policy agenda to amend the
Constitution. The 1987 Constitution provides three modes of changing the Charter: first,
through a Constitutional Convention that is popularly elected; second, through a
Constituent Assembly composed of both Houses of Congress; and third, via a ‘People’s
Initiative’, which requires the support of 12 per cent of registered voters in the country
and at least 3 per cent of the voters in each district. The current attempt to change the
form of government is perhaps the most momentous, packaged as a means to remedy thecrisis-prone political system.

Regime opponents interpreted the sudden attention given to constitutional change in the
midst of the President’s crisis of legitimacy as a bid for a ‘graceful exit’ rather than as a
fundamental constitutional reform. President Arroyo’s detractors, some of whom have
been steadfast supporters of amending the Constitution, dismissed the move as
diversionary.On 16 December, the 55-man Consultative Commission (ConCom) created by the
President, submitted its proposals for revising the 1987 Constitution. The report
recommended the following:
· shift to a unicameral parliamentary system and eventually towards a federal
government system,
· removal of economic restrictions on foreign investors,
· electoral reforms,
· political party reforms, and
· judicial reforms.

Thus, the magic elixir is to rewrite the constitution and switch from a presidential system to a parliamentary system. Proponents of this move claim that under a parliamentary system, politics in the Philippines will become more professional. There will be less chance of a celebrity being elected to the highest office. It will also put an end to the gridlock that now often exists between the different branches of government. In all, they claim, the mere change to a parliamentary system is the miracle solution to all that ails the Philippines. Those pushing changes to the country's constitution belong to one of two schools of thought. One wants to make the changes through a constitutional convention. This means the electorate would elect delegates from throughout the country who would then meet to thrash out the issues. A majority of 23 senators, as well as President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, have indicated they prefer this method.

Their plan is to select the delegates simultaneously with the national elections of 2004. The problems with this method are myriad. Many fear that selecting the delegates during national elections will only politicize the process, something nearly everyone in this over politicized country wants to avoid. Another worry is the cost, as holding a constitutional convention is expected to cost close to US$100 million, money the cash-strapped government simply doesn't have. And yet another complaint with this method is that the changes made would only take hold in 2010, and that the Philippines simply cannot wait that long for change. The other school wants to effect change through a constituent assembly. This is a much simpler and faster method as it entails the present members of Congress - 23 senators and 220 members of the

House of Representatives - convening to make the changes to the constitution. The House itself wants this method and has already started deliberations on a resolution authorizing congress to transform itself into an assembly in order to change the constitution. The problems with

Congress doing the job are also numerous. The Philippine public simply doesn't trust its own politicians. They fear that the members of Congress want to switch to a parliamentary system as soon as possible in order to cancel the 2004 elections and perpetuate themselves in power for several more years. The prospect of no elections has others imagining even more sinister maneuverings. Arroyo has claimed she is not going to run for president in 2004. If there is a change to parliamentary system she won't have to and could still keep the job. Even though she has said she prefers constitutional change via the election of convention delegates, the speaker of the House is a member of the party which she heads. He happens to be the main proponent of the move to a parliamentary system and to make those changes quickly through a constituent assembly. The entire issue is becoming divisive because motives and methods are readily and justifiably questioned. A political advisor to Arroyo made the claim that the country needs the parliamentary system in order to institutionalize the two People Power uprisings. "If we no longer have confidence in our national leader and his government," he said recently, "we don't need to go out in the streets again because a parliamentary system will provide the institution to change governments." Some have found that statement rather ironic. The same people that gained power by taking their gripes in to the streets and encouraging what some feel was nothing more than a coup against a legitimately elected leader, now want to perpetuate themselves in power and stop that from happening again.

Columnist Neil Cruz, writing in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, claims that a parliamentary system, even with proper political parties, would actually be worse for the Philippines. "Under this system," he wrote, "any pipsqueak congressman who would be the counterpart of members of parliament can become prime minister, the head of government, if he has enough money to buy the votes of his fellow MPs. The position of the top executive of the nation will be for sale.

What should be even more of a wake-up call to the politicians pushing for changes to the charter are two recent surveys indicating that a good majority of Filipinos are against tampering with the constitution at this time, especially if it is done by the current members of Congress. The public's attitude is best summed up by Senator Serge Osmena III, who recently wondered aloud what many had already been thinking - the miracle Filipinos have been waiting for is not a change in the constitution, but a change in the behavior of the people who run the country, no matter the form of government as mandated by the constitution.

"The system of government is not important," Osmena said. "There will be parliamentary crooks or federal crooks as there are now presidential crooks. The important thing is the people, not the system. If we put the same crooks in government, whether it is parliamentary, federal or presidential, we would still have the same rotten government."

Obama - McCain Debate following the rules in argumentation?

The third and final debate of the 2008 campaign featured some of the sharpest exchanges to date between Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain. The tension between the two was heightened by the fact that for the first time in this debate season, the two men were seated right next to each other.

Wednesday night's debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., focused primarily on domestic issues, and not surprisingly, the discussion turned immediately to the economy. In his first question, moderater Bob Schieffer of CBS News asked the two candidates to compare their plans for solving the economic crisis.

Tax cuts solution to current crisis?

McCain defended his plan to buy up $300 billion worth of bad mortgages, and he criticized Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson for not taking this step. Obama said he wanted to focus his efforts on assistance to the middle class and quickly outlined his plans to create more jobs and cut taxes.

Both started assumptions or premises. McCain stated that the Americans were angry and have every reason to be angry. He exclaimed that subprime lending situation caused the housing market in America to collapse as a reasoning and concluded that by reversing this continued decline in home ownership and put a floor under it, people will have not only the hope and belief they can stay in their homes and realize the American dream.

Obama, on the other hand, started emphasizing on a factual experience that Americans are experiencing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. He then back it up with opinions like the fundamentals of the economy were weak even before this latest crisis therefore needed for a diverse program to focus on specific topics like Jobs and tax cuts for middle class families as his goal.

The first argumentation in summary was the accusation of McCain to Obama of relying on "class warfare" and asked Obama why he would want to raise taxes at a time of economic distress. Obama insisted he is planning to raise taxes only for the richest Americans. Obama's tax plan would be better for the bottom 80 percent of Americans by income. McCain's would favor the top 20 percent of Americans by income. Obama said some Americans, such as investor Warren Buffett, could afford to pay a little more to finance a middle-class tax cut.

Abortion And Judicial Nominees

The two candidates had what may be their longest exchange about the issue of abortion. They differed clearly in their answers to a question about whether they would apply a "litmus test" to Supreme Court nominees on whether they support the right to an abortion.
McCain said that while he opposed the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, he would not apply a litmus test to nominees. But he said he believed the states should be allowed to decide abortion issues.

Obama said that the right to an abortion should no more be open to states' interpretation then any other right, such as freedom of speech. He insisted that only a woman and her doctor should decide whether to choose abortion.

Both established the "burden of proof", the advocate, to marshal evidence for his/her position in order to convince or force the opponent's acceptance.

Sparring Over The Bush Legacy

McCain tried several times to seize the initiative and spoke directly to Obama. When Obama said that the Bush administration was responsible for the current budget deficit, McCain turned to him and said, "Sen. Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago."

Obama linked McCain to President Bush over and over, saying that his Republican rival had backed the administration's economic policies. But McCain underscored his maverick status, saying he has the scars to prove that he has fought the president's policies when he felt it was important. McCain said he had opposed the administration by emphasizing the need to fight global warming and that he had fought the use of torture in the interrogation of suspected terrorists.

At this time of the debate, McCain fulfilled the burden of proof which created a burden of rejoinder. He tried to identify faulty reasoning in Obama’s argument, to attack the reasons/premises for his argument, and provide counterexamples, to identify any logical fallacies, and to show why a valid conclusion cannot be derived from the reasons provided from Obama’s arguments.

'Joe The Plumber'

On health care, the two went over some familiar ground. McCain accused Obama of planning to fine any business that does not provide health care to its employees. Obama reassured "Joe the Plumber" that small businesses would be exempt from such requirements. The two argued throughout the debate over whether "Joe" would be better off under an Obama or a McCain administration.

"Joe" is, in fact, Joe Wurzelbacher, who is trying to buy a plumbing business in Toledo, Ohio. Several days ago, Wurzelbacher told Obama that the Democrat's tax plan would keep him from buying that business. Throughout the debate, "Joe" came to symbolize average Americans trying to run a business.

The two candidates' positions on education are not that far apart, but during the debate they sought to emphasize their differences on a topic that has largely dropped out of the campaign.
Obama said education was key to the country's economic future and outlined plans to give college students a $4,000 tuition tax credit. Obama also said that spending more on early childhood education would save money in the long run by producing higher student achievement. Obama also complained that No Child Left Behind was a good idea that was underfunded. He said the federal government needs to step up with more funding for education.

McCain said that throwing money at the problem was not the solution. He said the answer for low-income parents was to give them the ability to choose another school if their local school was failing. McCain said that districts that have offered more choice have shown success and that charter schools offer an important alternative to failing public schools. Obama said that he, too, has been a supporter of charters.

Obama was the one carrying the "burden of proof", he supported and assembled evidence for his/her position in order to convince or force the McCain's acceptance. Obama accomplished this method by producing valid, sound, and cogent arguments, devoid of weaknesses, and not easily attacked.

The Negativity Blame Game

The two traded shots over who was responsible for the negative tone of the campaign. McCain accused Obama of spending more on negative ads than any candidate in history. He also denounced as "hurtful" remarks made by Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, a civil rights leader who compared some tactics of McCain supporters to those used by segregationist George Wallace.

Obama said he had distanced himself from Lewis' comments. And he charged that every ad McCain had run in recent weeks was negative. According to the Wisconsin Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, "nearly 100 percent" of the ads that McCain ran in the week of Sept. 28 to Oct. 4 were negative. Obama's ads in that week were 34 percent negative.

However, McCain was correct in saying that Obama has spent more on negative ads than he has. What McCain did not note is that Obama has spent more overall, since the Democrat opted out of the public financing system and can therefore raise unlimited amounts of funds.
McCain also defended one of the more controversial charges that he has raised about Obama: McCain said Obama's relationship with William Ayers deserves to be investigated. Ayers is a college professor who has admitted to bombing the Pentagon while a member of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. He has served on a community board in Chicago with Obama.

Obama tried to explain that he had only a distant association with Ayers, whose involvement with the Weather Underground dated back to when Obama was 8 years old. Obama said he would rather be known for his associations with leading military leaders and others who, he said, would serve as his advisers if he wins the White House.

Conclusively, both gave an intense exchange of argumentation with strong premise which their conclusions are derived. It was definitely mind buggling in watching both presidential icons of America to identify and understand the arguments either explicit or implied with their goal to overthrow each other. As a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released Tuesday showed Obama with a 6-point advantage, while a Washington Post-ABC News poll from Monday showed him with a 10-point lead among likely voters, I also vote for the lead of Barrack Obama which is currently the President of the United States of America.

Argumentation and the grounds of knowledge

Argumentation theory, or argumentation, embraces the arts and sciences of civil debate, dialogue, conversation, and persuasion; studying rules of inference, logic, and procedural rules in both artificial and real world settings. Argumentation is concerned primarily with reaching conclusions through logical reasoning, that is, claims based on premises. Although including debate and negotiation which are concerned with reaching mutually acceptable conclusions, argumentation theory also encompasses eristic dialog, the branch of social debate in which victory over an opponent is the primary goal. This art and science is often the means by which people protect their beliefs or self-interests in rational dialogue, in common parlance, and during the process of arguing. Argumentation is used in law, for example in trials, in preparing an argument to be presented to a court, and in testing the validity of certain kinds of evidence. Also, argumentation scholars study the post hoc rationalizations by which organizational actors try to justify decisions they have made irrationally.

Key components of argumentation

• Understanding and identifying arguments, either explicit or implied, and the goals of the participants in the different types of dialogue.
• Identifying the premises from which conclusions are derived
• Establishing the "burden of proof”— determining who made the initial claim and is thus responsible for providing evidence why his/her position merits acceptance
• For the one carrying the "burden of proof", the advocate, to marshal evidence for his/her position in order to convince or force the opponent's acceptance. The method by which this is accomplished is producing valid, sound, and cogent arguments, devoid of weaknesses, and not easily attacked. In a debate, fulfillment of the burden of proof creates a burden of rejoinder. One must try to identify faulty reasoning in the opponent’s argument, to attack the reasons/premises of the argument, to provide counterexamples if possible, to identify any logical fallacies, and to show why a valid conclusion cannot be derived from the reasons provided for his/her argument

Components of Argument
1. Claim
Conclusions whose merit must be established. For example, if a person tries to convince a listener that he is a British citizen, the claim would be “I am a British citizen.”
2. Data
The facts we appeal to as a foundation for the claim. For example, the person introduced in 1 can support his claim with the supporting data “I was born in Bermuda.”
3. Warrant
The statement authorizing our movement from the data to the claim. In order to move from the data established in 2, “I was born in Bermuda,” to the claim in 1, “I am a British citizen,” the person must supply a warrant to bridge the gap between 1 & 2 with the statement “A man born in Bermuda will legally be a British Citizen.”
4. Backing
Credentials designed to certify the statement expressed in the warrant; backing must be introduced when the warrant itself is not convincing enough to the readers or the listeners. For example, if the listener does not deem the warrant in 3 as credible, the speaker will supply the legal provisions as backing statement to show that it is true that “A man born in Bermuda will legally be a British Citizen.”
5. Rebuttal
Statements recognizing the restrictions to which the claim may legitimately be applied. The rebuttal is exemplified as follows, “A man born in Bermuda will legally be a British citizen, unless he has betrayed Britain and has become a spy of another country.”
6. Qualifier
Words or phrases expressing the speaker’s degree of force or certainty concerning the claim. Such words or phrases include “possible,” “probably,” “impossible,” “certainly,” “presumably,” “as far as the evidence goes,” or “necessarily.” The claim “I am definitely a British citizen” has a greater degree of force than the claim “I am a British citizen, presumably.”

Argumentation and the grounds of knowledge

Argumentation theory was once based upon foundationalism, a theory of knowledge (epistemology) in the field of philosophy. It sought to find the grounds for claims in the forms (logic) and materials (factual laws) of a universal system of knowledge. As argument scholars gradually rejected the idealism in Plato and Kant, and jettisoned with it the idea that argument premises take their soundness from formal philosophical systems, the field broadened. Karl R. Wallace's seminal essay, "The Substance of Rhetoric: Good Reasons," Quarterly Journal of Speech (1963) 44, led many scholars to study "marketplace argumentation," that is the ordinary arguments of ordinary people. The seminal essay on marketplace argumentation is Anderson, Ray Lynn, and C. David Mortensen, "Logic and Marketplace Argumentation." Quarterly Journal of Speech 53 (1967): 143-150. This line of thinking led to a natural alliance with late developments in the sociology of knowledge. Some scholars drew connections with recent developments in philosophy, namely the pragmatism of John Dewey and Richard Rorty. Rorty has called this shift in emphasis "the linguistic turn."
In this new hybrid approach argumentation is used with or without empirical evidence to establish convincing conclusions about issues which are moral, scientific, epistemic, or of a nature in which science alone cannot answer. Out of pragmatism and many intellectual developments in the humanities and social sciences, "non-philosophical" argumentation theories grew which located the formal and material grounds of arguments in particular intellectual fields. These theories include informal logic, social epistemology, ethno methodology, speech acts, the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of science, and social psychology. These new theories are not non-logical or anti-logical. They find logical coherence in most communities of discourse. These theories are thus often labeled "sociological" in that they focus on the social grounds of knowledge.

Internal structure of arguments

Typically an argument has an internal structure, comprising of the following

1. a set of assumptions or premises
2. a method of reasoning or deduction and
3. a conclusion or point.

An argument must have at least one premise and one conclusion.

Often classical logic is used as the method of reasoning so that the conclusion follows logically from the assumptions or support. One challenge is that if the set of assumptions is inconsistent then anything can follow logically from inconsistency. Therefore it is common to insist that the set of assumptions is consistent. It is also good practice to require the set of assumptions to be the minimal set, with respect to set inclusion, necessary to infer the consequent. Such arguments are called MINCON arguments, short for minimal consistent. Such argumentation has been applied to the fields of law and medicine. A second school of argumentation investigates abstract arguments, where 'argument' is considered a primitive term, so no internal structure of arguments is taken on account.

In its most common form, argumentation involves an individual and an interlocutor/or opponent engaged in dialogue, each contending differing positions and trying to persuade each other. Other types of dialogue in addition to persuasion are eristic, information seeking, inquiry, negotiation, deliberation, and the dialectical method (Douglas Walton). The dialectical method was made famous by Plato and his use of Socrates critically questioning various characters and historical figures.

Conversational argumentation

The study of naturally-occurring conversation arose from the field of sociolinguistics. It is usually called conversational analysis. Inspired by ethnomethodology, it was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s principally by the sociologist Harvey Sacks and, among others, his close associates Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. Sacks died early in his career, but his work was championed by others in his field, and CA has now become an established force in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, speech-communication and psychology. It is particularly influential in interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and discursive psychology, as well as being a coherent discipline in its own right. Recently CA techniques of sequential analysis have been employed by phoneticians to explore the fine phonetic details of speech.
Empirical studies and theoretical formulations by Sally Jackson and Scott Jacobs, and several generations of their students, have described argumentation as a form of managing conversational disagreement within communication contexts and systems that naturally prefer agreement.

Legal argumentation

Legal arguments (or oral arguments) are spoken presentations to a judge or appellate court by a lawyer (or parties when representing themselves) of the legal reasons why they should prevail. Oral argument at the appellate level accompanies written briefs, which also advance the argument of each party in the legal dispute. A closing argument (or summation) is the concluding statement of each party's counsel (often called an attorney in the United States) reiterating the important arguments for the trier of fact, often the jury, in a court case. A closing argument occurs after the presentation of evidence.

Political argumentation

Political arguments are used by academics, media pundits, candidates for political office and government officials. Political arguments are also used by citizens in ordinary interactions to comment about and understand political events. The rationality of the public is a major question in this line of research. A robust political science research tradition seems to prove that the American public is largely irrational and ignorant of even the most basic knowledge of national or world affairs. Political scientist S. Popkin coined the expression "low information voters" to describe most voters who know very little about politics or the world in general.
Some theorists have inferred from this that only comprehensively trained elites can debate public issues. They point as additional proof to the practice of academic debate in the United States, an activity almost exclusively involving children of the upper middle classes, future lawyers and graduate students, and not ordinary citizens.