AMENDMENT VS REVISION:

An amendment envisages an alteration of one or a few specific and separable

provisions. The guiding original intention of an amendment is to improve specific parts or to add new
provisions deemed necessary to meet new conditions or to suppress specific portions that may have
become obsolete or that are judged to be dangerous. In revision, however, the guiding original
intention and plan contemplate a re-examination of the entire document-or of provisions
of the document (which have overall implications for the entire document or for the
fundamental philosophical underpinnings of the document)-to determine how and to
what extent it should be altered. Thus, for instance, a switch from the presidential system
to a parliamentary system would be a revision because of its overall impact on the entire
constitutional structure. So would a switch from a bicameral system to a unicameral
system because of its effect on other important provisions of the Constitution.

It is thus clear that what distinguishes revision from amendment is not the quantum of
change in the document. Rather, it is the fundamental qualitative alteration that effects
revision. Hence, I must reject the puerile argument that the use of the plural form of
"amendments" means that a revision can be achieved by the introduction of a multiplicity
of amendments!

But the further question really is: Why only amendments? The answer, which one can easily glean from
the rather long deliberations on initiative and referendum in the 1986 Constitutional Commission, is
practicality. In other words, who is to formulate the revision or how is it to be formulated?

If one has even only a cursory familiarity with the legislative process, he or she will easily realize how
many times a provision is altered and re-altered before it reaches its final form. If this is true of simple
changes, how much more complicated would it be if the revision of a Constitution were involved? Just
as an example, it took the 1986 Constitutional Commission so much debate, through more
than five months, to revise the 1973 Constitution. How can millions of voters agree on a
formula to be presented first for signatures and finally for ratification in a plebiscite?
Thus you naturally wonder (or, perhaps, you should not wonder) how the formula
presented to the people two Saturdays ago was formulated, and who formulated it. Was it
an initiative of the people? Perhaps, we are not allowed to ask that under pain of being considered
destabilizers!

In the initiative and referendum process, the first step, after a formula has been polished, is the
gathering of signatures to support it, and the second step is the presentation of the formula to the people
in a plebiscite. Assuming that the required number of signatures was obtained two Saturdays
ago, what proposal will be presented to the voters for intelligent assessment in a
plebiscite? I recall that in 1971, when the Constitutional Convention wanted to rush the approval of the
lowering of the voting age, the Supreme Court said that the proposed change could not be presented in a
plebiscite yet in the absence of a completely formulated draft Constitution. Without a complete draft, the
individual amendment would have no context. What would be the context for the proposal to
repeal Articles VI and VII of the present Constitution?

I am afraid that what is going on involves not just unconstitutionality but also duplicity.