Wednesday, December 13, 2006 Carvajal: Case against a unicameral congress By Orlando P. Carvajal Break Point
THE way administration congressmen are immorally railroading Charter change is one good argument against the unicameral congress they are pushing for. If they can bully their evil way now in a bicameral situation, they can do it with even greater ease in a unicameral congress.
For the record, I do not care much for our expensive Senate that does nothing more than conduct hearings and grandstand to get the needed name recall for their presidential ambitions. Yet, we really do not need to abolish the Senate and now that majority congressmen have shown how they can misbehave, I do not think we should. (What simply needs to happen is for senators to be elected by a defined constituency unlike now when they are elected at large and accountable to no one).
The other day, I read in the papers that Rep. Prospero Nograles chided people to join the plebiscite and not the protests. This misses the issue completely and can only be intentional. What every decent Filipino, starting with the bishops, has condemned as immoral is the undue haste to railroad changes. We are all for some changes in the Charter but not this way and definitely not by the existing congress whose sinister motives are not lost to many of us.
For Rep. Constantino Jaraula, those who say it’s not time for Charter change are really not for any change at all. He too sidesteps the real issue of the dark motive behind the haste and the scheming. The truth of the matter is that we who oppose their immoral moves are for real change while they are railroading their version of Cha-cha because they just want superficial and cosmetic changes that would allow them to hang on to their positions of power.
Then they took a step backwards and left the door ajar for a constitutional convention. But note the catch…only if the Senate makes the deadline to come and discuss the Con-Con with them. The Senate has refused to abide by the deadline. So it’s back to Con-Ass for our congressmen.
But even if the Senate was tricked into agreeing to a Con-Con, they made sure they could push for their Charter revisions by stipulating, first, that the election of the Con-Con delegates will be held simultaneous with the coming May elections and, second, that the qualifications of the Con-Con delegates shall be the same as those of congressmen.
If we love this country, we must have elections in May. But since the Comelec has not been revamped we must watch the coming elections because we have people in government now whose capacity for serious mischief has been appallingly and shamelessly demonstrated. They are one good reason we should think twice before shifting to a unicameral congress.
