MANILA, Philippines — “Next time, stay in the hall.”
Senate President Vicente Sotto III issued this reminder to Sen. Imee Marcos when she moved to have her vote reconsidered on an already adopted resolution urging the President to rethink his plan to scrap the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) with the United States pending review of the upper chamber.
Marcos said she was not aware that voting was going on, though she was in the Senate hall.
The exchange between her and Sotto started when she stood up to inquire if a vote was recorded on her part.
“Yes, because there was a motion to adopt Resolution 312. That means a vote, obviously. We asked for an objection, Nobody objected. We adopted the resolution, and therefore it was voted into,” Sotto, who was presiding over the session, told Marcos.
“And then there was one abstention recorded by Senator [Ronald “Bato”] Dela Rosa. That is the situation of the Resolution 312,” he added.
The resolution was adopted with no objections during the Senate session Monday night.
It was only Dela Rosa, whose visa cancelation triggered the President’s threat to terminate the VFA, who abstained.
Marcos then requested to have her vote reconsidered arguing that she was not aware that a vote was actually being taken.
“I did not at any point vote,” she said. That is the actual status, and the passage of this resolution was without our knowledge that a vote was in fact taken.”
But Sotto told the neophyte senator that it was “not the fault of the leadership of the Senate.”
“You were not in the hall,” he said.
Marcos countered that she was in the Senate hall.
This prompted Sotto to question why she did not object or abstain from voting on the resolution if she was indeed inside the plenary hall.
Marcos repeated that she was not aware that a vote was being taken since only eight senators were inside the hall — so there was “no quorum was, in fact, present to establish a voting procedure.”
The Senate president refuted this and explained that there was a “continuing implication” that there was a quorum “once the roll call has been called and there is no roll call thereafter.”
“That’s correct,” Marcos responded.
“O, next time, stay in the hall,” Sotto said.
Marcos insisted that she was inside the hall.
Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel Zubiri, who agreed with Sotto, explained that, should senators who voted in favor of a resolution wish to clarify their votes, it should be done through a motion to reconsider the resolution or measure within the next two days.
“If that’s the case, I’ll be very happy to correct the vote as recorded. My vote is in fact abstention and no vote was made at all,” Marcos said.
Zubiri moved to suspend the session for a few minutes.
When it resumed, Sotto set the record straight on the status of the resolution.
“Yesterday there was a quorum. Yesterday there was a vote. We adopted Senate Resolution 312 sometime in the evening. The quorum is presumed because no one questioned the quorum when we had [20] senators present. So just to set the record straight, we took a vote. Nobody asked for nominal voting. It was merely a motion to adopt,” he explained.
On the advice of Zubiri, Marcos moved to withdraw her motion to reconsider the resolution and instead expressed her abstention.
“[I] instead merely manifest that, if I had been aware that there was such a motion to approve the said resolution, I would have abstained,” she said.
“Given that I, in fact, have an alternate resolution… that makes no mention of advisement or pressure upon the President who clearly has a free hand in the formulation of foreign policy,” she said.
Five other senators — Pia Cayetano, Cynthia Villar, Christopher “Bong” Go, Francis Tolentino, and Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr. — also said they would have abstained.
“Seven would have abstained [including Dela Rosa], but there were 20 in the quorum, therefore, the resolution would still have been adopted,” Sotto pointed out.
The resolution was adopted the night before the Philippines officially ended sent a termination notice to the US Embassy in Manila on Tuesday.
/atm