[ G.R. No. L-2044. August 26, 1949 ] 84 Phil. 368
[ G.R. No. L-2044. August 26, 1949 ]
J. ANTONIO ARANETA, PETITIONER, VS. RAFAEL DINGLASAN, JUDGE OF FIRST INSTANCE OF MANILA, AND JOSE P. BENGZON, FISCAL OF CITY OF MANILA, RESPONDENTS. [G.R. No. L-2756] J. ANTONIO ARANETA AND GREGORIO VILLAMOR, PETITIONERS, VS. EUGENIO ANGELES, FISCAL OF CITY OF MANILA, RESPONDENT. [G.R. No. L-3054] EULOGIO RODRIGUEZ, SR., POR SI Y COMO PRESIDENTE DEL PARTIDO NACIONALISTA, RECURRENTE, CONTRA EL TESORERO DE FILIPINAS, RECURRIDO. [G.R. No. L-3055] LEON MA. GUERRERO, PETITIONER, VS. THE COMMISSIONER OF CUSTOMS AND THE ADMINISTRATOR, SUGAR QUOTA OFFICE DEPARTMENET OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY, RESPONDENTS. [G.R. No. L-3056] ANTONIO BARREDO, IN HIS OWN BEHALF AND ON BEHALF OF FALL TAXPAYERS SIMILARLY SITUATED, PETITIONER, VS. THE COMMISSION ON ELECTIONS, THE AUTITOR GENERAL AND THE INSULAR TREASURER OF THE PHILIPPINES, RESPONDENTS. D E C I S I O N
TUASON, J.:
Three of these cases were consolidated for argument and the other two were argued separately on other dates. Inasmuch as all of them present the same fundamental question which, in our view, is decisive, they will be disposed of jointly. For the same reason we will pass up the objection to the personality or sufficiency of interest of the petitioners in case G. R. No. L-3054 and case G. R. No. L-3056 and the question whether prohibition lies in cases Nos. L-2044 and L-2756. No practical benefit can be gained from a discussion of these procedural matters, since the decision in the cases wherein the petitioners cause of action or the propriety of the procedure followed is not in dispute, will be controlling authority on the others. Above all, the transcendental importance to the public of these cases demands that they be settled promptly and definitely, brushing aside, if we must, and technicalities of procedure. (Avelino vs. Cuenco, G. R. No. L-2821.) The petitions challenge the validity of executive orders of the President avowedly issued in virtue of Commonwealth Act No. 671. Involved in Cases Nos. L-2044 and L-2756 is Executive Order No. 62, which regulates rentals for houses and lots for residential buildings. The petitioner, J. Antonio Araneta, is under prosecution in the Court of First Instance of Manila for violation of the provisions of this Executive Order, and prays for the issuance of the writ of prohibition to the Judge and the City Fiscal. Involved in Case L-3055 is Executive Order No. 192, which aims to control exports from the Philippines. In this case, Leon Ma. Guerrero seeks a writ of mandamus to compel the Administrator of the Sugar Quota Office and the Commissioner of Customs to permit the exportation of shoes by the petitioner. Both officials refuse to issue the required export license on the ground that the exportation of shoes from the Philippines is forbidden by this Executive Order. Case No. L-3054 relates to Executive Order No. 225, which appropriates funds for the operation of the Government of the Republic of the Philippines during the period from July 1, 1949 to June 30, 1950, and for other purposes. The petitioner, Eulogio Rodriguez, Sr., as a tax-payer, an elector, and president of the Nacionalista Party, applies for a writ of prohibition to restrain the Treasurer of the Philippines from disbursing money under this Executive Order. Affected in Case No. L-3056 is Executive Order No. 226, which appropriates P6,000,000.00 to defray the expenses in connection with, and incidental to, the holding of the national elections to be held in November, 1949. The petitioner, Antonio Barredo, as a citizen, tax-payer and voter, asks this Court to prevent “the respondents from disbursing, spending or otherwise disposing of that amount or any part of it.” Notwithstanding allegations in the petitions assailing the constitutionality of Act No. 671, the petitioners do not press the point in their oral argument and memorandum. They rest their case chiefly on the proposition that the Emergency Powers Act (Commonwealth Act No. 671) has ceased to have any force and effect. This is the basic question we have referred to, and it is to this question that we will presently address ourselves and devote greater attention. For the purpose of this decision, only, the constitutionality of Act No. 671 will be taken for granted, and any dictum or statement herein which may appear contrary to that hypothesis should be understood as having been made merely in furtherance of the main thesis. Act No. 671 in full is as follows:
“AN ACT DECLARING A STATE OF TOTAL EMERGENCY AS A RESULT OF WAR INVOLVING THE PHILIPPINES AND AUTHORIZING THE PRESIDENT TO PROMULGATE RULES AND REGULATIONS TO MEET SUCH EMERGENCY.
“Be it enacted by the National Assembly of the Philippines: “SECTION 1. The existence of war between the United States and other countries of Europe and Asia, which involves the Philippines, makes it necessary to invest the President with extraordinary powers in order to meet the resulting emergency. “SEC. 2. Pursuant to the provisions of Article VI, section 26, of the Constitution, the President is hereby authorized, during the existence of the emergency, to promulgate such rules and regulations as he may deem necessary to carry out the national policy declared in section 1 hereof. Accordingly, he is, among, other things, empowered (a) to transfer the seat of the Government or any of its subdivisions, branches, departments, offices, agencies or instrumentalities; (b) to re organize the Government of the Commonwealth including, the determination of the order of precedence of the heads of the Executive Department; (c) to create new subdivisions, branches, departments, offices, agencies or instrumentalities of government and to abolish any of those already existing; (d) to continue in force laws and appropriations which would lapse or otherwise become inoperative, and to modify or suspend the operation or application of those of an administrative character; (e) to impose new taxes or to increase, reduce, suspend or abolish those in existence; (f) to raise funds through the issuance of bonds or otherwise, and to authorize the expenditure of the proceeds thereof; (g) to authorize the national, provincial, city or municipal governments to incur in overdrafts for purposes that he may approve; (h) to declare the suspension of the collection of credits or the payment of debts; and (i) to exercise such other powers as he may deem necessary to enable the Government to fulfill its responsibilities and to maintain and enforce the authority. “SEC. 3. The President of the Philippines shall as soon as practicable upon the convening of the Congress of the Philippines report thereto all the rules and regulations promulgated by him under the powers herein granted. “SEC. 4. This Act shall take effect upon its approval and the rules and regulations promulgated hereunder shall be in force and effect until the Congress of the Philippines shall otherwise provide.”
Section 26 of Article VI of the Constitution Provides:
“In time of war or other national emergency the Congress may by law authorize the President, for a limited period and subject to such restrictions as it may prescribe, to promulgate rules and regulations to carry out a declared national policy.”
Commonwealth Act No. 671 does not in term fix the duration of its effectiveness. The intention of the Act has to be sought for in its nature, the object to be accomplished, the purpose to be subserved, and its relation to the Constitution. The consequences of the various constructions offered will also be resorted to as additional aid to interpretation. We test a rule by its results. Article VI of the Constitution provides that any law passed by virtue thereof should be “for a limited period.” “Limited” has been defined to mean “restricted; bounded; prescribed; confined within positive bounds; restrictive in duration, extent or scope.” (Encyclopedia Law Dictionary, 3rd Ed. 669; Black’s Law Dictionary, 3rd Ed., 1120.) The words “limited period” as used in the Constitution are beyond question intended to mean restrictive in duration. Emergency, in order to justify the delegation of emergency powers, “must be temporary or it can not be said to be an emergency.” (First Trust Joint Stock Land Bank of Chicago v. Adolph P. Arp., et al., 120 A.L.R. pp. 937-938.) It is to be presumed that Commonwealth Act No. 671 was approved with this limitation in view. The opposite theory would make the law repugnant to the Constitution, and is contrary to the principle that the legislature is deemed to have full knowledge of the constitutional scope of its powers. The assertion that new legislation is needed to repeal the act would not be in harmony with the Constitution either. If a new and different law were necessary to terminate the delegation, the period for the delegation, it has been correctly pointed out, would be unlimited, indefinite, negative and uncertain; “that which was intended to meet a temporary emergency may become permanent law,” (Peck v. Fink, 2 F (2d) 912); for Congress might not enact the repeal, and even if it would, the repeal might not meet with the approval of the President, and the Congress might not be able to override the veto. Furthermore, this would create the anomaly that, while Congress might delegate its powers by a simple majority, it might not be able to recall them except by a two-third vote. In other words, it would be easier for Congress to delegate its powers than to take them back. This is not right and is not, and ought not to be, the law. Corwin, President: Office and Powers, 1948 Ed., p. 160, says:
“It is generally agreed that the maxim that the legislature may not delegate its powers signifies at the very least that the legislature may not abdicate its powers. Yet how, in view of the scope that legislative delegations take nowadays, is the line between delegation and abdication to be maintained? Only, I urge, by rendering the delegated powers recoverable without the consent of the delegate; x x x.”
Section 4 goes far to settle the legislative intention of this phase of Act No. 671. Section 4 stipulates that “the rules and regulations promulgated there under shall be in full force and effect until the Congress of the Philippines shall otherwise provide.” The silence of the law regarding the repeal of the authority itself, in the face of the express provision for the repeal of the rules and regulations issued in pursuance of it, is a clear manifestation of the belief held by the National Assembly that there was no necessity to provide for the former. It would be strange if having no idea about the time the Emergency Powers Act was to be effective the National Assembly failed to make a provision for its termination in the same way that it did for the termination of the effects and incidents of the delegation. There would be no point in repealing or annulling the rules and regulations promulgated under a law if the law itself was ;to remain in force, since, in that case, the President could not only make new rules and regulations but he could restore the ones already annulled by the legislature. More anomalous than the exercise of legislative functions by the Executive when Congress is in the unobstructed exercise of its authority is the fact that there would be two legislative bodies operating over the same field, legislating concurrently and simultaneously, mutually nullifying each other’s actions. Even if the emergency powers of the President, as suggested, be suspended while Congress was in session and be revived after each adjournment, the anomaly would not be eliminated. Congress by a 2/3 vote could repeal executive orders promulgated by the President during congressional recess, and the President in turn could treat in the same manner, between sessions of Congress, laws enacted by the latter. This is not a fantastic apprehension; in two instances it materialized. In entire good faith, and inspired only by the best interests of the country as they saw them, a former President promulgated an executive order regulating house rentals after he had vetoed a bill on the subject enacted by Congress, and the present Chief Executive issued an .executive order on export control after Congress had refused to approve the measure. Quite apart from these anomalies, there is good basis in the language of Act No. 671 for the inference that the National Assembly restricted the life of the emergency powers of the President to the time the Legislature was prevented from holding sessions due to enemy action or other causes brought on by the war. Section 3 provides:
“The President of the Philippines shall as soon as practicable upon the convening of the Congress of the Philippines report thereto all the rules and regulations promulgated by him under the powers herein granted.”
The clear tenor of this provision is that there was to be only one meeting of Congress at which the President was to give an account of his trusteeship. The section did not say each meeting, which it could very well have said if that had been the intention. If the National Assembly did not think that the report mentioned in Section 3 was to be the first and last and did not think that upon the convening of the first Congress Act No. 671 would lapse, what reason could there be for its failure to provide in appropriate and clear terms for the filing of subsequent reports? Such reports, if the President was expected to continue making laws in the form of rules, regulations and executive orders, were as important, or as unimportant, as the initial one. As a contemporary construction, President Quezon’s statement regarding the duration of Act No. 671 is enlightening and should carry much weight, considering his part in the passage and in the carrying out of the law. Mr. Quezon, who called the National Assembly to a special session, who recommended the enactment of the Emergency Powers Act, if indeed he was not its author, and who was the very President to be entrusted with its execution, stated in his autobiography, “The Good Fight,” that Act No. 671 was only “for a certain period” and “would become invalid unless reenacted.” These phrases connote automatical extinction of the law upon the conclusion of a certain period. Together they denote that a new legislation was necessary to keep alive (not to repeal) the law after the expiration of that period. They signify that the same law, not a different one, had to be repassed if the grant should be prolonged. What then was the contemplated period? President Quezon in the same paragraph of his autobiography furnished part of the answer. He said he issued the call for a special session of the National Assembly “when it became evident that we were completely helpless against air attack, and that it was most unlikely the Philippine Legislature would hold its next regular session which was to open on January 1, 1942.” It can easily be discerned in this statement that the conferring of enormous powers upon the President was decided upon with specific view to the inability of the National Assembly to meet. Indeed no other factor than this inability could have motivated the delegation of powers so vast as to amount to an abdication by the National Assembly of its authority. The enactment and continuation of a law so destructive of the foundations of democratic institutions could not have been conceived under any circumstance short of a complete disruption and dislocation of the normal processes of government. Anyway, if we are to uphold the constitutionality of the act on the basis of its duration, we must start with the premise that it fixed a definite, limited period. As we have indicated, the period that best comports with the constitutional requirements and limitations, with the general context of the law and with what we believe to be the main if not the sole raison d’etre for its enactment, was a period coextensive with the inability of Congress to function, a period ending with the convening of that body. It is our considered opinion, and we so hold, that Commonwealth Act No. 671 became inoperative when Congress met in regular session on May 25, 1946, and that Executive Orders Nos. 62, 142, 225 and 226 were issued without authority of law. In setting the first regular session of Congress instead of the first special session which preceded it as the point of expiration of the Act, we think we are giving effect to the purpose and intention of the National Assembly. In a special session, the Congress may “consider general legislation or only such subjects as he (President) may designate.” (Section 9 Art. VI of the Constitution.) In a regular session, the power of Congress to legislate is not circumscribed except by the limitations imposed by the organic law. Having arrived at this conclusion, we are relieved of the necessity of deciding the question as to which department of government is authorized to inquire whether the contingency on which the law is predicated still exists. The right of one or another department to declare the emergency terminated is not in issue. As a matter of fact, we have endeavored to find the will of the National Assembly—call that will an exercise of the police power or the war power—and, once ascertained, to apply it. Of course, the function of interpreting statutes in proper cases, as in this, will not be denied to the courts as their constitutional prerogative and duty. In so far as it is insinuated that the Chief Executive has the exclusive authority to say that war has not ended, and may act on the strength of his opinion and findings in contravention of the law as the courts have construed it, no legal principle can be found to support the proposition. There is no pretense that the President has independent or inherent power to issue such executive orders as those under review. We take it that the respondents, in sustaining the validity of these executive orders rely on Act No. 600, Act No. 620, or Act No. 671 of the former Commonwealth and on no other source. To put it differently, the President’s authority in this connection is purely statutory, in no sense political or directly derived from the Constitution. Act No. 671, as we have stressed, ended ex propio vigore with the opening of the regular session of Congress on May 25, 1946. Acts Nos. 600 and 620 contain stronger if not conclusive indication that they were self-liquidating. By express provision the rules and regulations to be eventually made in pursuance of Acts Nos. 600 and 620, respectively approved on August 19, 1940 and June 6, 1941, were to be good only up to the corresponding dates of adjournment of the following sessions of the legislature, “unless sooner amended or repealed by the National Assembly.” The logical deduction to be drawn from this provision is that in the minds of the lawmakers the idea was fixed that the Acts themselves would lapse not later than the rules and regulations. The design to provide for the automatic repeal of those rules and regulations necessarily was predicated on the consciousness of a prior or at best simultaneous repeal of their source. Were not this the case, there would arise the curious spectacle, already painted, and easily foreseen, of the Legislature amending or, repealing rules and regulations of the President while the latter was empowered to keep or return them into force and to issue new ones independently of the National Assembly. For the rest, the reasoning heretofore adduced against the asserted indefinite continuance of the operation of Act No. 671 equally applies to Acts Nos. 600 and 620. The other corollary of the opinion we have reached is that the question whether war, in law or in fact, continues, is irrelevant. If we were to assume that actual hostilities between the original belligerents are still raging, the conclusion would not be altered. After the convening of Congress new legislation had to be approved if the continuation of the emergency powers, or some of them, was desired. In the light of the conditions surrounding the approval of the Emergency Powers Act, we are of the opinion that the “state of total emergency as a result of war” envisaged in the preamble referred to the impending invasion and occupation of the Philippines by the enemy and the consequent total disorganization of the Government, principally the impossibility for the National Assembly to act. The state of affairs was one which called for immediate action and with which the National Assembly would not be able to cope. The war itself and its attendant chaos and calamities could not have necessitated the delegation had the National Assembly been in a position to operate. After all the criticisms that have been made against the efficiency of the system of the separation of powers, the fact remains that the Constitution has set up this form of government, with all its defects and shortcomings, in preference to the commingling of powers in one man or group of men. The Filipino people by adopting parliamentary government have given notice that they share the faith of other democracy-loving peoples in this system, with all its faults, as the ideal. The point is, under this framework of government, legislation is preserved for Congress all the time, not excepting periods of crisis no matter how serious. Never in the history of the United States, the basic features of whose Constitution have been copied in ours, have the specific functions of the legislative branch of enacting laws been surrendered to another department unless we regard as legislating the carrying out of a legislative policy according to prescribed standards; no, not even when that Republic was fighting a total war, or when it was engaged in a life and death struggle to preserve the Union. The truth is that under our concept of constitutional government, in times of extreme perils more than in normal circumstances “the various branches, executive, legislative, and judicial”, given the ability to act, are called upon “to perform the duties and discharge the responsibilities committed to them respectively.” These observations, though beyond the issue as formulated in this decision, may, we trust, also serve to answer the vehement plea that for the good of the Nation, the President should retain his extraordinary powers as long as turmoil and other ills directly or indirectly traceable to the late war harass the Philippines. Upon the foregoing considerations, the petitions will be granted. In order to avoid any possible disruption and interruption in the normal operation of the Government, we have deemed it best to depart in these cases from the ordinary rule relative to the period for the effectivity of decisions, and to decree, as it is hereby decreed, that this decision take effect fifteen days from the date of the entry of final judgment provided in Section 8 of Rule 53 of the Rules of Court in relation to Section 2 of Rule 35. No costs will be charged. Moran, C. J., concurs in part. Ozaeta, J., concurs. Paras, J., concurs and also in separate opinion. Feria, J., concurs in so far as the decision is not in conflict with his separate opinion.