Senate President Juan Miguel Zubiri poured cold water on a move to amend or revise the Constitution, saying it did not have enough senators to back it up, especially since President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. himself wasn’t supporting charter change.
“Without the support of the president, it will be very difficult to push this because as you know, it will need budgeting support from the executive branch, through the ,” he said in the “Usapang Senado” radio program on dwIZ.While he expressed his personal support for the bid to make revisions to the country’s Constitution, Zubiri was concerned that prolonging the debates on charter change will only let Congress “lose its focus,” a reference to urgent legislative matters.
“What we want to help are the people we have not reached through meaningful legislation because if we spend all our time on Charter change debates, but at the end of the day there is no vote … we are wasting a lot of time and effort; we are wasting a lot of energy and funding discussing a measure that we don’t have a vote on,” he said.
But Zubiri said that it was a “time-bound and honored tradition” that the senators take their time in passing any measure. “That is the prerogative of our peers. We serve at the pleasure of our peers. My take there is that we are doing our best and we have been passing a lot of legislation,” he said.Zubiri also played down assurances by House lawmakers that charter change would only involve amending what they described as “restrictive” economic provisions of the Constitution.
“This will make things really chaotic, and the people will be mad at their legislators,” Zubiri said. “So, I’d say let us just use what we have now, which is an effective 1987 Constitution,” he said, adding that Congress had passed revisions of economic laws to overcome constitutional restrictions on investments and foreign participation in selected industries.
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