BAGABUYO - v - COMELEC
December 8, 2008, EN BANC, G.R. No. 176970, BRION, J.
Doctrine: A pronounced
distinction between Article VI, Section 5 and, Article X, Section 10 is on the
requirement of a plebiscite. The Constitution and the Local Government Code
expressly require a plebiscite to carry out any creation, division, merger,
abolition or alteration of boundary of a local government unit. In contrast, no plebiscite requirement exists
under the apportionment or reapportionment provision.
Legislative apportionment is the determination of
the number of representatives which a State, county or other subdivision may
send to a legislative body. It is the allocation of seats in a legislative body
in proportion to the population; the drawing of voting district lines so as to
equalize population and voting power among the districts.
Historically and by its intrinsic nature, a
legislative apportionment does not mean, and does not even imply, a division of
a local government unit where the apportionment takes place.
Facts:
In 2006, Cagayan de Oro’s then Congressman Jaraula
filed and sponsored House Bill No. 5859: An Act Providing for the Apportionment
of the Lone Legislative District of the City of Cagayan De Oro. This law
eventually became Republic Act No. 9371 which increased Cagayan de Oro’s
legislative district from one to two. For the election of May 2007, Cagayan de
Oro’s voters would be classified as belonging to either the first or the second
district, depending on their place of residence. The constituents of each
district would elect their own representative to Congress as well as eight
members of the Sangguniang Panglungsod.
In 2007, the COMELEC en Banc promulgated
Resolution No. 7837 implementing R.A. No. 9371. Petitioner Bagabuyo filed
the present petition against the COMELEC. In asking for the nullification
of R.A. No. 9371 and Resolution No. 7837 on constitutional grounds, the
petitioner argued that the COMELEC cannot implement R.A. No. 9371 without
providing for the rules, regulations and guidelines for the conduct of a
plebiscite which is indispensable for the division or conversion of a local
government unit. He prayed for the issuance of an order directing the
respondents to cease and desist from implementing R.A. No. 9371 and COMELEC
Resolution No. 7837, and to revert instead to COMELEC Resolution No. 7801 which
provided for a single legislative district for Cagayan de Oro.
Since the Court did not grant the petitioner’s
prayer for a temporary restraining order or writ of preliminary injunction, the
May 14 National and Local Elections proceeded according to R.A. No. 9371 and
Resolution No. 7837.
Issues: Whether or not R.A.
No. 9371 merely provide for the legislative reapportionment of Cagayan de Oro
City, or does it involve the division and conversion of a local government unit.
Whether or not R.A. No. 9371 violate the equality of representation doctrine.
Ruling:
On Plebiscite Requirement
Legislative apportionment is
defined by Blacks Law Dictionary as the determination of the number of
representatives which a State, county or other subdivision may send to a
legislative body. It is the allocation of seats in a legislative
body in proportion to the population; the drawing of voting district lines so
as to equalize population and voting power among the districts. Reapportionment,
on the other hand, is the realignment or change in legislative
districts brought about by changes in population and mandated by the
constitutional requirement of equality of representation.
Article VI of the 1987 Constitution lays down the
rules on legislative apportionment under its Section 5. Separately from the
legislative districts that legal apportionment or reapportionment speaks of,
are the local government units that the Constitution itself classified into
provinces, cities, municipalities and barangays. The creation,
division, merger, abolition or alteration of boundary of local government units
are covered by the Article X, section 10. Under both Article VI, Section
5, and Article X, Section 10 of the Constitution, the authority to act has been
vested in the Legislature. The Legislature undertakes the apportionment and
reapportionment of legislative districts, and likewise acts on local
government units by setting the standards for their creation, division, merger,
abolition and alteration of boundaries and by actually creating, dividing,
merging, abolishing local government units and altering their boundaries
through legislation. Other than this, not much commonality exists
between the two provisions since they are inherently different although they
interface and relate with one another.
Article VI, Section
5
|
Article X, Section
|
- political representation and the means to make a legislative
district sufficiently represented so that the people can be effectively
heard.
- aim of legislative apportionment is to equalize population and
voting power among districts.
- emphasis is given to the number of people represented; the uniform
and progressive ratio to be observed among the representative districts; and
accessibility and commonality of interests in terms of each district being,
as far as practicable, continuous, compact and adjacent territory.
- in terms of the people represented, every city with at least 250,000
people and every province (irrespective of population) is entitled to one
representative.
- to ensure continued adherence to the required standards of
apportionment, Section 5(4) specifically mandates reapportionment as soon as
the given standards are met.
|
- expressly speaks of how local government units may be created,
divided, merged, abolished, or its boundary substantially altered.
- its concern is the commencement, the termination, and the
modification of local government units corporate existence and territorial
coverage
- it speaks of two specific standards that must be observed in
implementing the above concern, namely: 1) the criteria established in the
local government code and 2) the
approval by a majority of the votes cast in a plebiscite in the political
units directly affected.
- under the LGC, the criteria of income, population and land area are
specified as verifiable indicators of viability and capacity to provide
services.
|
A pronounced
distinction between Article VI, Section 5 and, Article X, Section 10 is on the
requirement of a plebiscite. The Constitution and the Local Government
Code expressly require a plebiscite to carry out any creation, division,
merger, abolition or alteration of boundary of a local
government unit. In contrast, no plebiscite requirement exists under the apportionment or reapportionment provision.
government unit. In contrast, no plebiscite requirement exists under the apportionment or reapportionment provision.
Nature and Areas of
Application
The legislative
district that Article VI, Section 5 speaks of may, in a sense, be
called a political unit because it is the basis for the election of a member of
the House of Representatives and members of the local legislative body. It
is not, however, a political subdivision through which functions of government
are carried out. It can more appropriately be described as a representative unit
that may or may not encompass the whole of a city or a province, but unlike the
latter, it is not a corporate unit. Not being a corporate unit, a district
does not act for and in behalf of the people comprising the district; it merely
delineates the areas occupied by the people who will choose a representative in
their national affairs. Unlike a province, which has a governor; a city or
a municipality, which has a mayor; and a barangay, which has
a punong barangay, a district does not have its own chief
executive. The role of the congressman that it elects is to ensure
that the voice of the people of the district is heard in Congress, not to oversee
the affairs of the legislative district. Not being a corporate unit also
signifies that it has no legal personality that must be created or dissolved
and has no capacity to act. Hence, there is no need for any plebiscite in
the creation, dissolution or any other similar action on a legislative
district.
The local government units, on the other
hand, are political and corporate units. They are the
territorial and political subdivisions of the state. They possess legal
personality on the authority of the Constitution and by action of the
Legislature. The Constitution defines them as entities that Congress can,
by law, create, divide, abolish, merge; or whose boundaries can be altered
based on standards again established by both the Constitution and the
Legislature. A local government units corporate existence begins upon the
election and qualification of its chief executive and a majority of the members
of its Sanggunian. As a political subdivision, a local government
unit is an instrumentality of the state in carrying out the functions of
government. As a corporate entity with a distinct and separate juridical
personality from the State, it exercises special functions for the sole benefit
of its constituents. It acts as an agency of the community in the
administration of local affairs and the mediums through which the people
act in their corporate capacity on local concerns. In light of these
roles, the Constitution saw it fit to expressly secure the consent of the
people affected by the creation, division, merger, abolition or alteration of
boundaries of local government units through a plebiscite.
Historically and by
its intrinsic nature, a legislative apportionment does not mean, and
does not even imply, a division of a local government unit where the
apportionment takes place.
R.A. No. 9371 and COMELEC Res. No. 7837
R.A. No. 9371 is, on its face, purely and simply a
reapportionment legislation passed in accordance with the authority granted to
Congress under Article VI, Section 5(4) of the Constitution. No division
of Cagayan de Oro City as a political and corporate entity takes place or is
mandated. Cagayan de Oro City politically remains a single unit and its
administration is not divided along territorial lines. Its territory remains completely
whole and intact; there is only the addition of another legislative district
and the delineation of the city into two districts for purposes of
representation in the House of Representatives.
Equality of
representation
The law clearly provides that the basis for
districting shall be the number of the inhabitants of a city
or a province, not the number of registered voters therein. The
Court takes judicial notice of the 2007 census of the National Statistics
Office which shows that barangays comprising Cagayan de Oro’s
first district have a total population of 254,644, while the second district
has 299,322 residents. Undeniably, these figures show a disparity in the
population sizes of the districts. The Constitution, however, does not require
mathematical exactitude or rigid equality as a standard in gauging equality of
representation. In fact, for cities, all it asks is that each city with
a population of at least two hundred fifty thousand shall have one
representative, while ensuring representation for every province
regardless of the size of its population. To ensure quality representation
through commonality of interests and ease of access by the representative to
the constituents, all that the Constitution requires is that every legislative
district should comprise, as far as practicable, contiguous,
compact, and adjacent territory. Thus, the Constitution leaves the local
government units as they are found and does not require their division, merger
or transfer to satisfy the numerical standard it imposes. Its requirements
are satisfied despite some numerical disparity if the units are contiguous,
compact and adjacent as far as practicable.
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