HOUSE Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez has expanded the crisis created by the disagreement between the Senate and the House on how to amend the Constitution.
Initially, it was just the question of whether the two houses will vote jointly or separately. The Senate insists on separate voting while the House argues for joint voting.
There’s now the additional question whether the House can validly adopt amendments without the participation of the Senate. Alvarez said the House alone can muster the required three-fourths vote, counting the senators.
The House is not Congress. The Constitution didn’t intend to have the joint action by the Senate and the House to be done by one house alone.
The Supreme Court inevitably will be asked to rule on the issue.
Quip about hell
Former Supreme Court chief justice Reynato Puno is for amending the Constitution but wants a constitutional convention to do it. Hilario Davide Jr., another former SC chief justice, opposes the move to amend the 1987 Constitution but if it should be amended, he also wants concon, not a constituent assembly, to do it.
Davide’s contention that shifting to federal government is a “leap to hell” gets the quip from Puno that he wouldn’t know, he hasn’t gone there. The kind of riposte one hears in a barroom argument, not in a hearing before the Senate committee on constitutional amendments.
The Cebuano retired jurist, however, didn’t explain how the metaphor applies, what bad things federalism would bring. Or was it failure of news reporting? Even news online, which has a lot more space than newspapers, didn’t provide the information, if indeed Davide gave them.
Roque and ‘Flash Report’
A news reporters group asked Presidential Spokesman Harry Roque to identify culprits in the circulation of the false news by “Cebu Flash Report” about an alleged bomb placed near a store in Lapu-Lapu City.
Those who compose the so-called CFR Five were long identified. The regional police chief then was quoted as saying that they have a strong case and they turned it over to the city mayor for filing.
It’s doubtful if the case could prosper under the Bomb Joke Law, which is a joke of a law. (Roque could easily spot the law’s flaw.) And if it’s true that the CFR is now owned by a publicist long associated with the mayor and her family, would she file it?
Tell us about it.
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