Chief presidential legal counsel Juan Ponce Enrile (File photo from the Senate Public Relations and Information Bureau)
MANILA, Philippines — After saying that he would hold secret meetings with congressmen on amending the 1987 Constitution, Sen. Robinhood Padilla stepped back from the idea on Wednesday and said all discussions on the matter should be public and transparent.
During the hearing of the Senate Committee on Constitutional Amendments which he chairs, Padilla clarified that he did not intend to call for a bicameral meeting on the proposals to amend the constitution through Resolution of Both Houses No. (RBH) 6.
“I thank the Senate leadership for allowing me to hold this meeting in public, and not in executive session because if that [were] the case, what will be discussed between [chief presidential legalcCounsel and former Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile] and I [would] no longer be divulged,” he said.
Padilla was supposed to convene on March 20 a committee hearing on RBH 6 with several congressmen as “resource persons,” but Senate President Juan Miguel Zubiri asked him to postpone the invitation to the congressmen.
“Traditionally, the Senate does not invite incumbent members of Congress as resource persons, as they are accorded parliamentary courtesy, being members of a co-equal branch of legislation,” Zubiri said in a statement on Monday.
Besides, only the Senate president, in concurrence with the speaker, can call a joint hearing on a pending measure and RBH 6 had already been approved on third and final reading by the House of Representatives. Padilla said the hearings on RBH 6 were not meant to be “joint sessions” and “I have nothing but good intentions for the country.”
“I got a headache trying to pore over the rules of the Senate because I could not find anything there that bars [a Senate committee] from inviting members of the House,” Padilla said.
Nonetheless, the neophyte senator tried to save the day by pointing at the testimony of Enrile, who said he shared Padilla’s position that the constitution’s economic provisions need to be amended via a constituent assembly.
In his testimony, Enrile opposed RBH 6 because of its method and its cost.
“Why call for a Con-con (constitutional convention) to amend our Constitution, if we’ll just add the phrase ‘unless otherwise provided by law’?” Enrile asked in Filipino. “If Congress can’t understand the phrase ‘unless otherwise provided by law,’ what can Congress understand?