EDITORIAL - Betrayal of the Filipino people

When greed consumes the heart, things that are clear to the mind get obscured. And that is what happened Tuesday night when the House of Representatives passed a resolution calling for its unilateral conversion into a constituent assembly to effect charter change.

The main proponent of House Resolution 1109, Luis Villafuerte, said he crafted the measure not so much as to effect charter change itself but to provoke the intervention of the Supreme Court so as to settle the issue of constituent assembly once and for all.

The matter of Congress constituting itself into a constituent assembly became an issue when congressmen eager to effect charter changes introduced a different interpretation of the constitutional provision defining the process of constituting a constituent assembly.

The widely-held, time-honored and long-acknowledged process is for the two houses of Congress, the House of Representatives and the Senate, to vote separately. This is true in all legislative processes and so should not be any different in a similar process.

But over-zealous congressmen, betraying a life-and-death compulsion, and seizing the opportunity arising from the fact that they grossly outnumber all senators combined, have introduced a different interpretation — that of unilateral voting.

The running argument is that the Senate can vote separately if it wants and the outcome will remain the same. Even voting to a man, the 24-member Senate cannot hope to outvote the House of Representatives, whose nearly 250 members are mostly in favor of charter change.

And so, employing tyranny of numbers, the House of Representatives worked with uncanny zeal late into the night of Tuesday (a zeal that is often missing in other, more pressing measures) to bulldoze HR 1109 into being.

As if to underscore the duplicity of it all, Villafuerte himself did not participate in the proceedings. By distancing himself from his own creation, he hopes to be spared the public backlash that the measure is certain to generate. They call it “namamangka sa dalawang ilog.”

What happened is a betrayal of public trust. The people whom congressmen love to say they represent have absolutely no desire for charter change at this time. What we are seeing is nothing more than a manifestation of unbridled political greed.