House-only Cha-cha ‘highly questionable,’ says minority

The move by the House of Representatives to amend the Constitution without the Senate is “highly questionable,” according to ranking members of the chamber’s duly recognized minority bloc.

In a press briefing on Wednesday, Senior Deputy Minority Leader Lito Atienza said that if the two chambers’ stalemate remained unresolved, Charter change (Cha-cha) would be “dead in the water.”

Atienza also warned about Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez’s interpretation that the 1987 Constitution did not explicitly require the House and the Senate to convene together into a “constituent assembly.”

“The probability of a Supreme Court ruling against us is very, very high,” he said.

Deputy Minority Leader Eugene Michael de Vera said the term “constituent assembly” was a product of jurisprudence by no less than the Supreme Court, citing its September 1970 ruling in the case of Raul Gonzales vs Commission on Elections.

Alvarez reiterated in Wednesday’s GMA program “Unang Hirit” that the framers of the 1987 Constitution were to blame for the ambiguity and the failure to specify the the term “constituent assembly.” —Vince F. Nonato