E-08557 Concurring and Dissenting Opinion: Senior Associate Justice Marvic M.V.F. Leonen — Official PDF

Concurring and Dissenting Opinion 10 G.R. No. E-08557 source: the election. An elective officer holds office as of right because the. people chose them and chose that officer for the period the law then fixed. An’ incumbent’s claim of right reaches as far as the election that conferred it, and no farther. The two years that Republic Act No. 12326 adds are not held by that title, but by the statute alone. . Otherwise stated, the additional two years to an incumbeént’s term proceeds from subsequent legislative authorization rather than a renewed expression of the electorate’s choice. : A subsequent enactment cannot alter the electoral choice actually made by the voters in 2023. It can only attach new consequences to what they did,?¢ When the new consequence is that the voters are treated as having chosen their officials until 2028, the law does more than regulate the exercise of suffrage; it attributes to the electorate a choice they never made. The right of suffrage protects a citizen’s capacity to author the choice of who will govern. A statute that rewrites that choice after it has been made takes the authorship away while appearing to respect it. It may be argued that that the voters were aware, at the time of the 2023 elections, that Congress could subsequently amend the law governing term of office, so that the possibility of an extension was part of the covenant from the start... That theory. is flawed. Every legal situation is exposed to future legislation. If that exposure were enough to defeat the voters’ reliance on the term in force, no election’ would settle anything, and every barangay official would serve for as long as Congress chose. In 2023, voters knew Congress could change the term of the officials who would come after. That knowledge is not consent to extending the officials they were then electing. A reading that turns the bare possibility of legislation into the people’s consent would leave the right of suffrage -~- dependent upon legislative discretion. It is in this respect that the application of the five-year term to incumbent officials may be distinguished from its prospective application. When the five-year term governs officials yet to be elected, the electorate exercises its right of suffrage with knowledge of the duration of the authority to be conferred. The newly prescribed term consequently forms part of the legal framework under which the electorate makes its choice and the electorate’s consent will contain the longer period. Nothing is taken from them, because they gave it. v4 36 J.-L. AUSTIN, How TO Do THINGS WITH WORDS 12-13 (1962). Lecture II explains that the effect of a performative act depends on the conventional procedure in force when the act is performed. A vote is such an act. Its content is fixed by the rules under which it is cast.