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

Concurring and Dissenting Opinion 12 G.R. No. E-08557 What resides is distinct from what emanates. Sovereignty remains with the people. Authority flows out from them to the offices the Constitution... creates. Congress holds authority of the second kind. It exercises the legislative power that the people, through the Constitution, vested in it. Article VI, Section | states that the vesting is not total. The legislative power belongs to Congress “except to the extent reserved to the people by the provision on initiative and referendum.”*? On election day, the electorate does not exercise authority that has emanated from anyone. It exercises the sovereignty that resides in it. This Court has recognized that the people have “a natural and a constitutional right to participate directly inthe form of government under which they live.”“° An election is the most regular occasion of that direct participation: : An election is also not an exercise of legislative power. It-is the act by which the people make their agents. Congress exists, and its members hold their seats, because of acts of this kind. Its authority derives from elections, and it cannot be turned against the content of elections without making ‘the derivative superior to its source. Alexander Hamilton stated the principle in defending judicial review: “every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission: under which it is exercised, is void,” for to deny it “would be to affirm, that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves." Congress never delegated the power to choose who will govern a barangay. Congress cannot elect a punong barangay. It cannot reach the same result by statute, by declaring that the person the people chose for one period will also serve for another.” * CONsT., art. VI, sec. | states, “The legislative power shall be vested in the Congress of the Philippines which shail consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives, except to the extent reserved to the people by the provision on initiative and referendum.” 40 Macalintal v. Commission on Elections 943 Phil. 212, 213 (2023) [Per J. Kho, Jr., En Banc], citing Geroninio v. Ramos, 221 Phil. 130,141 (1985) [Per J. Gutierrez, Jr., En Banc]. Alexander Hamilton, The — Federalist Papers: No. 78 (1788), available at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/|8th_century/fed78.asp. Hamilton made the argument to justify judicial review of legislation. The principle he relied on, that a delegated authority cannot act against the tenor of its commission, is the part that matters here. This and the other foreign and philosophical materials in this opinion are cited for their reasoning and not as authority. so 42 John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690), Chapter 13 (149), available at https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/second-treatise-chapters-[3-15/; JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, THE SOCIAL CONTRACT (1762), Book III, Chapter 15, trans. G. D. H. Cole, available at https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jean-jacques-rousseau/the-social-contract/g-d-h-cole/text/chapter-3- Is. John Locke described the legislative as “only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends,” with “a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative” remaining in the people. Jean-Jacques Rousseau went further. and denied that sovereignty could be represented at all: “The deputies of the people, therefore, are not and cannot be its representatives: they are merely its stewards, and can carry through no definitive acts.” al