SC affirms Congress’s power to fix 5-year barangay, SK terms

Voting 9-5, the Court upholds Republic Act No. 12326 as a valid exercise of Congress’s power to fix the term of barangay officials, sustaining five-year terms and a November 2028 election.

Three days after the Commission on Elections stopped the printing of ballots and the filing of certificates of candidacy for the November 2, 2026 Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan Elections, election lawyer Romulo B. Macalintal was back at the Supreme Court. It was his third challenge in as many years to a law that moved the barangay polls. He had won the first. He lost the second. On October 14, 2026, he lost the third.

In a decision penned by Associate Justice Rodil V. Zalameda, the Court En Banc dismissed Macalintal’s Petition for Certiorari and Prohibition in Macalintal v. Office of the President, et al. (G.R. No. E-08557) and upheld the constitutionality of Republic Act No. 12326, affirming anew that Congress may “fix, modify, and extend the term of office of barangay officials as circumstances and public welfare dictate.” The law lengthens the term of barangay and SK officials to five years and sets the next BSKE on the second Monday of November 2028. The Court also refused to issue a temporary restraining order, a status quo ante order, or a writ of preliminary injunction.

The ruling turns on a single question that has now defined two cases: is a law that changes how long barangay officials serve, and in doing so pushes back the next election, a law that sets terms or a law that postpones elections? The answer decides which constitutional yardstick applies, and the Court held, as it did in 2025, that the answer is the former.

A law signed one day, an election halted the next

President Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr. signed Republic Act No. 12326 on September 24, 2026. It took effect upon its publication in the Official Gazette the following day. That same day, the COMELEC issued Minute Resolution 26-0842, approving the cessation of all activities for the November 2026 BSKE.

The new law amends Republic Act No. 12232, which had been signed only on August 13, 2025. That earlier law gave barangay officials four-year terms with a three-term limit, gave SK officials one term in the same position, and scheduled the next BSKE for November 2, 2026. Republic Act No. 12326 changes the term to five years, cuts the consecutive-term limit for barangay officials from three to two, and moves the election to November 2028 and every five years after.

It also does more. A new Section 4-A lets city and municipal mayors appoint qualified persons to fill vacancies in SK membership, though not in the office of the SK chairperson. A new Section 4-B directs the Department of the Interior and Local Government, with TESDA, the COMELEC, state universities and colleges, and other agencies, to institutionalize training for barangay and SK officials. Section 5, the transitory provision, declares that “considering the extension of their terms by two years,” incumbent barangay officials are regarded as having completed one term, and those already on their last term may not run for the same post in 2028. Any unspent BSKE appropriation becomes a continuing appropriation of the COMELEC for the 2028 national and local elections.

Macalintal filed his petition on September 27, 2026, as a registered voter of Las Piñas City, a taxpayer, and a practicing lawyer. He argued that the law was an election postponement law dressed as a term-fixing law, that it failed the guidelines the Court laid down in 2023, that the hold-over of incumbents amounted to a legislative appointment of officials the Constitution requires to be elected, and that it violated the one subject-one title rule.

Two precedents, pulling in different directions

The case sat between two earlier rulings involving the same petitioner. In Macalintal v. COMELEC (2023), decided June 27, 2023, the Court struck down Republic Act No. 11935, which had postponed the December 2022 BSKE, for violating substantive due process and the right of suffrage. It laid down guidelines for any future law postponing elections, chief among them that a postponement must be justified by reasons “sufficiently important, substantial, or compelling,” and that the postponed election must not be held at an unduly remote date.

Then, on November 11, 2025, in Macalintal v. Senate, the Court dismissed the challenges to Republic Act No. 12232. It ruled that Article X, Section 8 of the Constitution leaves the term of barangay officials to be “determined by law,” that this power carries with it the power to decide when a new term begins, and that the 2023 guidelines do not apply to a law whose primary purpose is to set terms, even if it incidentally moves an election.

Macalintal asked the Court to revisit that 2025 ruling. The Court declined, citing stare decisis. He had raised the same theory before, the decision noted, and “identifies no compelling countervailing consideration that would justify a different result less than a year later.”

What the law says, not what the headlines said

The Court found in Republic Act No. 12326 every marker it had used to classify the 2025 law as term-setting: a title that speaks of “fixing” a term rather than postponing an election, an amendment to a term-setting statute rather than to Republic Act No. 9164, a new term structure, and a new interval between elections. Setting the next BSKE in November 2028, the Court said, “implements the new term, and is not an independent objective.”

Macalintal had pointed to news reports headlining the law as a postponement and to remarks at a media briefing. The Court was unmoved. “What a law is depends on what it says and what it principally seeks to accomplish, not on how it is described in the press,” the decision reads. Nor did the candid admission of the Senate sponsor that “the natural effect will, of course, be to postpone the upcoming [elections]” change the analysis, since an incidental effect “does not convert a term-setting law into a postponement law.”

The Court also rejected the argument that Congress could not change the term again barely a year after the last change. The Constitution, it said, prescribes no minimum lifespan for a statutory term.

The limit that still stands

The decision does not give Congress a free hand. The Court stressed that the 2025 ruling preserved a limit: the period before a new term begins must be “reasonable and should not be unduly long from the time of the enactment of the law.” It called that limit the Court’s “safeguard against the serial resetting of barangay elections that petitioner fears.”

The Court acknowledged a point against the government. The gap between the enactment of Republic Act No. 12326 in September 2026 and the November 2028 election is longer than the gap under the 2025 law, and the decision said this “must be acknowledged” and “cannot be resolved simply by measuring the period from the October 2023 election.” It nonetheless held the interval reasonable. Counted from the October 30, 2023 BSKE that elected the incumbents, November 2028 falls about five years later, the same interval the law now fixes for every BSKE. “The interval is not remote from the term,” the Court wrote. “It is the term.”

The Court also cited reasons from the legislative record. Holding the BSKE in 2027 would collide with the COMELEC’s preparations for the May 2028 national and local elections. Starting a five-year cycle in 2026 would make the BSKE coincide with the 2031 national and local elections, risking yet another postponement, while the cycle under the new law would coincide with a midterm election only once, in 2043. These reasons, the Court said, do not make November 2028 the only possible date, “but the Constitution does not require Congress to prove that no other date could work.”

Asked what would stop Congress from resetting the polls again in 2028, the Court answered that the same reasonableness limit would apply to every future law. “The Court passes upon laws that have been enacted, not upon those that have yet to be filed.”

Suffrage, due process, and the hold-over

On substantive due process, the Court found a lawful subject in effective local governance, program continuity, and the efficient use of public resources, and lawful means in a uniform five-year term and election cycle. That Congress rejected the alternative of holding the 2026 polls and applying the five-year term only to those elected then did not make the law arbitrary. The absence of a study showing that the four-year term was inadequate did not invalidate it either. On the oil crisis cited at the media briefing, the Court noted that the House sponsor himself treated it as secondary: “The price of oil goes up and down. The barangays’ need for time does not.”

“We may disagree with the reasons of Congress,” the Court wrote, “but it is not for the Court to replace them with its own.”

On suffrage, the Court reiterated its 2025 holding that an election is “regular” if it occurs at fixed, predictable intervals established by law. Because Republic Act No. 12326 sets a date certain and a recurring five-year cycle, voters keep a definite and periodic opportunity to choose their barangay and SK officials.

The hold-over argument also failed. The incumbents stay in office under Section 4 of Republic Act No. 12232, which the new law leaves untouched and which provides that officials remain until their successors are elected and qualified. The word “extension” in Section 5, the Court said, describes the practical effect of the transition and serves as a counting rule for term limits, but “does not independently appoint incumbents to a new term.” The Court drew on Lecaroz v. Sandiganbayan for the principle that “the law abhors a vacuum in public offices.”

On the one subject-one title rule, the Court found every provision germane to the new term structure. It conceded that the mayoral appointment of SK members under Section 3 “presents the more difficult question,” since it concerns the composition of the SK rather than the length of the term. It sustained the provision because of its link to continuity in the SK’s composition, and added that even if that link were insufficient, Section 3 could be severed under the law’s separability clause without affecting the core term-setting provisions.

No restraining order

The Court devoted a full part of the decision to explaining why no TRO would issue, even apart from the merits. The right Macalintal sought to protect was the right to vote on November 2, 2026, a date fixed by statute, not by the Constitution. “What one statute has fixed, a later statute may change,” the Court said, and in light of the 2025 ruling his claim was at best “a right in serious dispute,” not a clear and unmistakable right. “Urgency is a reason to act quickly,” the decision reads. “It is not, by itself, a reason to act.”

The Court also found the alleged injury reparable. In 2023, it noted, it decided the case after the December 2022 election date had passed and still fashioned relief. As for public funds, it cited the Senate sponsor’s explanation that only about PHP 8 billion of the BSKE budget had been obligated, of which about PHP 200 million would be unrecoverable, and that printed ballots could still be used in 2028, while stressing that these representations were cited only to show that the equities did not clearly favor the petitioner.

The decision closes by returning to Alexander Hamilton’s line in The Federalist No. 78, which also opens it, that the judiciary has “neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.” A restraining order, the Court said, would have had it exercise its will before exercising judgment.

Besides dismissing the petition, the Court admitted Macalintal’s reply and denied the motion to intervene filed by Jupiter Stalin M. Larida, the incumbent Punong Barangay of Barangay Kabangbang, Bantayan, Cebu. Larida had sided with the government, but the Court held that he had no legal interest in the case, since “no one has a vested right to hold any public office,” and that his arguments added nothing the Solicitor General had not already raised.

A divided Court

The signature page and the separate opinions show a split bench. Nine Justices voted to dismiss the petition, among them Associate Justice Jhosep Y. Lopez, who penned the 2025 ruling and wrote a concurring opinion. Senior Associate Justice Marvic M.V.F. Leonen wrote a concurring and dissenting opinion, joined by Associate Justices Ramon Paul L. Hernando and Ricardo R. Rosario, and voted to grant the petition in part. Associate Justices Alfredo Benjamin S. Caguioa and Antonio T. Kho, Jr., the latter the ponente of the 2023 decision that struck down the earlier postponement law, each dissented and voted to grant it in full. Associate Justice Maria Filomena D. Singh was on leave, and Associate Justice Japar B. Dimaampao was on official business but left a vote.

Lopez: “squarely a term-setting law”

Justice Lopez wrote separately “to emphasize certain points,” chiefly that the 2025 framework he authored settles this case. He applied the “primary purpose doctrine” from that ruling, under which the legal nature of a governmental act “is determined by its primary objective, not by its secondary or incidental effects.” Setting the titles and operative words of past BSKE laws side by side, he noted that the earlier measures spoke of “resetting” or “postponing” elections and never changed the term of office, while Republic Act No. 12232 “set” the term and Republic Act No. 12326 “fixes” it. “By that measure, Republic Act No. 12326 is squarely a term-setting law,” he wrote.

He warned that treating the law as both a term-setting and a postponement measure would mean that “every law that incidentally affects election timing is automatically characterized as ‘election postponement,'” a result that would “unduly limit” the power the Constitution gives Congress. Whether to apply a new term prospectively, he added, “is a policy question best left up to Congress and its political wisdom.”

On timing, Lopez described the second Monday of November 2028 as the “earliest practicable date” in Congress’s view: a 2026 start would collide with the 2031 national and local elections, a 2027 date would conflict with preparations for May 2028, and any earlier date in 2028 would run into the May 2028 polls themselves. He also rejected the rider challenge, calling Sections 2, 3, 4 and 6 “necessary components of establishing this new, five-year term structure.”

Leonen: “a choice they never made”

Senior Associate Justice Leonen agreed that Congress may lengthen barangay terms and that the petitioner had not shown a due process violation. “I regret that I cannot fully join the majority,” he wrote, because “the constitutional authority to determine the duration of public office does not include a power to prolong incumbency at the expense of the electorate’s right to choose their representatives.”

His dissent turns on the difference between a term and tenure. An elected official holds office as of right because the people chose that official for the period then fixed by law, and “an incumbent’s claim of right reaches as far as the election that conferred it, and no farther.” The two extra years under Republic Act No. 12326, he wrote, “are not held by that title, but by the statute alone.” By treating 2023 voters as having chosen their officials until 2028, the law “attributes to the electorate a choice they never made.”

He cautioned that the majority’s test could allow Congress to extend incumbents again and again through successive term-setting laws, each reasonable in isolation. “What the Constitution prohibits directly cannot be permitted indirectly,” he wrote. He also rejected the argument that Congress, being elected too, speaks for the people. Sovereignty resides in the people, while Congress holds only authority that emanates from them, and “Congress cannot elect a punong barangay.” He pointed out that the 1987 Constitution extended the terms of the then President and Vice-President through ratification by the people themselves, and cited Kida v. Senate for the point that “Congress was not granted this same power.”

Leonen also counted the human cost. Those who prepared to run in November 2026 had been due to file certificates of candidacy from September 28 to October 5, 2026, days after the law was signed. The young bear it hardest: membership in the Katipunan ng Kabataan ends at 30, so youth who could have voted in 2026 but will be past 30 by 2028 “will not merely have their votes postponed; their opportunity to vote is lost.”

“Congress loses nothing under this reading,” he wrote. “It may fix the barangay term at five years. It may begin the new term with the next election.” He voted to partially grant the petition and to declare Sections 2, 3, 5, 6 and 7 unconstitutional, keeping only the five-year term in Section 1 and the capacity-building provision in Section 4. “The elections should continue as scheduled. The new five-year term of office should apply to the next elected officials, not the incumbents.”

Kho: “a distinction without difference”

Justice Kho agreed with the majority that the requisites for judicial review were present, that Macalintal could come directly to the Court, and that Larida had no business intervening. On the merits, he dissented “in the strongest terms,” calling the case “essentially a replay” of the 2025 controversy and repeating the line from his dissent there: “When a law sets the election date to a date later than that set under the existing law, then the former law in essence postpones the election…. This here is a distinction without difference.”

Where the majority saw the term and the election date as two parts of one structure, Kho saw two separate measures. Citing Valle Verde Country Club, Inc. v. Africa, he defined a term as “the time during which the officer may claim to hold the office as of right,” which is distinct from the date on which an election is held. “One is not necessarily implied from nor proceed from the other,” he wrote. He noted that the legislative record gave different reasons for each. The longer term was tied to savings from fewer elections, the five-year local planning cycle, and giving officials time to deliver results. The new date was tied to the November 2026 schedule’s proximity to All Souls’ Day and the risk of colliding with the 2031 national and local elections. He traced the moving target: the first Monday of December 2025 under the old law, the first Monday of November 2026 under Republic Act No. 12232, and now the second Monday of November 2028.

He also pointed to legislators who had said the same thing. According to the congressional journals cited in his opinion, Senators Tito Sotto III and Villanueva and Representatives Co and Tinio all urged that the November 2026 polls proceed, with the five-year term applying only to those elected then. In a turno en contra reproduced in the dissent, Sotto told the Senate that this was “the eighth time that we have postponed barangay elections” and asked, “When will we stop?”

Because the date change was a postponement, Kho held that the 2023 guidelines applied, and that the law failed them. No sufficiently important reason supported moving the polls to 2028, the elections could have gone ahead with a prospective term, and the two-year gap was itself “a badge of the unreasonableness of the interval.” On due process, he found the reasons for a five-year term insufficient, noting that Villanueva had asked whether any empirical study showed the four-year term was inadequate and that Senator Escudero “simply pointed to the plenary power of the Congress” in reply. He would also have struck down Sections 2, 3, 4 and 6 as riders that the title does not reasonably predict. The majority, by contrast, had held that none of those sections were riders.

“The Court should not shirk from its duty in declaring unconstitutional a law that evidently violates the Constitution,” Kho concluded. “This, the ponencia unfortunately blatantly fails to perform.”

Caguioa: “the final blow to the rule of law”

Justice Caguioa’s dissent is shorter but sharper. He recalled his warning in 2025 that upholding Republic Act No. 12232 “would permit Congress to evade judicial review by concealing constitutionally suspect provisions—such as an election postponement—within an otherwise valid statute.” Barely a year later, he wrote, the Court “finds itself in the same position.”

He joined Kho on due process but went further on the standard of review. Because the law sets the intervals at which people may vote, he argued it should face strict scrutiny, requiring a compelling governmental interest and the least restrictive means. The majority, applying the ordinary lawful-subject and lawful-means test, had said the Constitution does not require Congress to justify a term with compelling reasons. Caguioa called “effective local governance” legitimate but too general to be compelling. “If ‘effective local governance’ is the objective, what has changed in the past year to warrant yet another term extension?” he asked, describing the jump to five years, without any study, as “whimsical and arbitrary.”

He treated Section 2’s new election date as a postponement provision and a prohibited rider, and he stressed that by November 2028 the incumbents elected in 2023 would have stayed in office “for more than five years since their election, without securing a renewed mandate from the people.” A new term, he wrote, should apply only prospectively, because extending the terms of sitting officials “would be tantamount to legislative appointments.”

His closing was the bluntest language in any of the opinions. “When the Court, in the 2025 Macalintal case, upheld the constitutionality of Republic Act No. 12232, I cautioned that the deferral of the BSKE had crossed a clear constitutional line. Barely a year later, that line has been crossed once more,” he wrote. “In denying the present Petition, the Court metaphorically gave into the siege, tilted the scales of justice towards the amplification of this institution’s debt to the democracy, and may have dealt the final blow to the rule of law.”

For now, the next barangay and SK elections are set for November 2028. The Court made clear it will keep watch over any future attempt to move them, warning that it “must remain vigilant against any legislative measure that would use term-setting as a pretext for indefinitely depriving the electorate of regular elections.”