The appellation (also known as "PI") also refers to the act—allowed by the law-given right of the Filipino people—of directly initiating statutes or calling for referendums on both the national and the local government level.
This is as defined in the Initiative and Referendum Act: Prohibited topicsThe process of amending the 1987 Constitution of the Philippines is popularly known to many Filipinos as Charter Change.
The Congress shall provide for the implementation of the exercise of this right.An enabling law for this Article XVII, Section 2 Philippine Constitutional provision, called the Initiative and Referendum Act, was authored in 1987 by senators Raul Roco (Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino) and Neptali Gonzales (Liberal Party) and was passed by the Eighth Congress of the Philippines in 1989.
On January 9, they launched a television commercial with the tagline "EDSA-Pwera" (a word play of EDSA and the Spanish-derived Tagalog term etsapuwera, which means to be rejected or excluded).
[5][6] PIRMA admitted talking with House Speaker Martin Romualdez about the initiative and claimed responsibility for a signature drive campaign that began around that time[7] but denied allegations of vote-buying.
[9] The proponents suggested that both chambers of Congress, the House of Representatives and the Senate, should vote jointly on the proposed amendments in a constitutional assembly.
[18] The proposition was one of civil society's resulting reactions to the Priority Development Assistance Fund scam of 2013 and the Million People March and other protests that followed.
An exploratory "people's congress" to draft an initiative on spending public funds was first convened by the ePIRMA at the Asian Institute of Management Conference Center on November 9, 2013, with Puno, Colmenares and ePIRMA's legal-team head Jose M. Roy III leading the conference that was attended by representatives from various groups coming from all over the country.
The petitioners included the Integrated Bar of the Philippines, Bagong Alyansang Makabayan, GABRIELA Women's Party, Bayan Muna, Ang Kapatiran, and Belgica, among others.
"[31] On September 4, 2014, Rep. Neri Colmenares announced that the ruling Liberal Party was trying to undermine the people's initiative against the pork barrel system.
Apart from a lack of knowledge about the pork barrel, Palma claimed that a low turnout was also a result of there being families who had children enrolled in schools under politicians' pork-funded scholarships whose relatives then refused to sign the proposition.
[30] In his blog of July 4, 2016, direct democracy advocate and art critic-painter Jojo Soria de Veyra, a member of ePIRMA, confessed that after the initiative's launch "the signature gathering was mostly left to certain parishes of the more organized Catholic Church, the primary backing of the Cebu Coalition.
Manny SD Lopez—ePIRMA's leading convenor and most active campaigner on the road—would also busy himself with organizing the Christian Peace Alliance, one of the groups advocating for a drastic review of some provisions of the then-in-its-final-thrust Bangsamoro Basic Law.
Lopez would also form the EdlSA 2.22.15 Coalition, a group that called for President Benigno Aquino III's resignation after the Mamasapano mishap.