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To construct the Philippine colonial government, American military and civil officials built on the remnants of the Spanish colonial administrative structure, staffed it with American personnel, operated it using American practices , employed it to pursue American-style modernization projects, animated it with American principles, and justified its activities within the American liberal constitutional tradition. While collaborating with the colonial regime, Filipino political leaders sought to Filipinize this institution and apply it toward Filipino goals. Their experience within the relationships that this institution ordered, of the programs for which it was used, and of the manner in which its activities were legitimated within American liberal constitutionalism provided Filipino delegates to the 1935 Constitutional Convention with the design and theoretical foundations on which to build their tropical New Deal. The 1935 Constitution, and the 1973 and 1987 charters that revised it, all strike a high-minded tone in charging the Philippine government with the task of promoting lofty goals such as social justice. To achieve such noble ends, the framers of all three charters empowered the Philippine government to take over industries and revise contract and property rights whenever this was required by the public interest. The power accorded to the Philippine government in the name of public welfare is a striking feature of the Philippine constitutions and was a point of great pride among the framers, as seen in the convention debates.Why did the Filipino framers take it for granted that this was how a government ought to operate, and what does this assumption reveal about Filipino understandings about the nature and role of public authority in the Philippine constitutional order? This essay argues that the key to answering these questions lies in the discourse and practice of American liberal constitutionalism in the context of the U.S. colonial government machinery and the projects that it undertook in the Philippine Islands. Spanish Structure,American Theory The Legal Foundations of a Tropical New Deal in the Philippine Islands, – anna leah fidelis t. castañeda 365 The Americans combined the highly centralized and interventionist Spanish era administrative structure, which was dominated by the Spanish governorgeneral for the most part, with a separation of powers design that concentrated even more power in the American-dominated executive branch at the expense of the Filipino-controlled legislature, in order to accommodate Filipino incapacity and guarantee the colonial sovereign’s preeminence. The lopsided framework and functioning of this American colonial state were facilitated and legitimized by a Philippine Supreme Court whose relatively weak position within the colonial institutional context, formalist and essentialist conception of law in general and of departmental roles in particular, and reliance on nineteenth-century American police power jurisprudence conditioned it to defer to the exercise by the political branches of their constitutionally assigned prerogatives, thereby validating these departments’ broad construction of the public category. The dynamic between Spanish structure and American theory created an activist colonial leviathan that Filipino political leaders attempted to capture throughout the colonial period and eventually adopted at its conclusion. Why the framers of the 1935 charter preferred the colonial constitutional model over other alternatives is best explained by delegate Manuel Roxas of Capiz, who said, “Because it is the government with which we are familiar. It is the form of government fundamentally such as it exists today; it is the only kind of government we have found to be in consonance with our experience.”1 The U.S. Colonial State The American colonial project in the Philippine Islands was transformative and developmental. This reflected the character of American colonialism in the islands, which was shaped by the need to reconcile the consent that underlay American democratic ideology with the inherently coercive nature of colonialism . In his instructions to the Philippine Commission, which served as the islands’ first organic act, President William McKinley exhorted the commissioners to “bear in mind that the government which they are establishing is designed not for our satisfaction or for the expression of our theoretical views, but for the happiness, peace, and prosperity of the people of the Philippine Islands.”2 To sell colonialism both in the United States and in the Philippine Islands, American policy makers asserted that U.S. colonial rule, unlike Old World imperialism , would be temporary, tutelary, and benevolent. That is, colonial government in the islands would be instituted to prepare the Filipino people for independent nationhood and carried out for their benefit. Francis Burton Harrison, a Democratic New York congressman who served as...

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