Belmonte warned against ‘playing with fire’

Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines—Playing with fire.

That’s what Quezon City Rep. Feliciano Belmonte is doing by seeking to relax the Constitution’s economic provisions through a resolution calling for the passage of new laws, Bayan Muna Representatives Neri Colmenares and Carlos Zarate said Wednesday.

Describing the method as a “constituent assembly,” they warned that it “is very dangerous and opens up the Constitution to the whims of a Congress that has passed obnoxious laws.”

“Once Congress is allowed easy access to constitutional amendment, and a precedent is set, it is a foregone conclusion that it would subsequently amend other provisions of the Constitution including for example the elimination of term limits for politicians,” they said in a statement.

“Bayan Muna is against extension of terms.  The proponents are just testing the waters, so to speak. Rep. Belmonte is apparently playing with fire through this method especially since nobody knows what future congresses would do to the Constitution.”

Belmonte’s proposed resolution would inject the phrase “unless otherwise provided by law” in the Constitution’s economic provisions. That would allow Congress to pass specific laws to relax such provisions, including allowing foreign ownership of land in the country.

“Rep. Belmonte’s Concurrent Resolution No. 1  will make the Constitution very vulnerable to greedy multinational companies like mining and agro-corporations,” Colmenares and Zarate warned.

Zarate said the rest of the Makabayan bloc in the House of Representatives “would go all-out to block this move because this along with the proposed expansion of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) and access agreement, would essentially make the Philippines a full pledged (sic) colony of foreign powers like the US, Japan and China.”

Colemenares and Zarate described as “baseless” the argument that the Charter had to be amended because of its “restrictive” economic provisions.

“In fact it is completely untrue because many of the economic miracles they cite are countries (that) also have restrictive or protectionist provisions,” the congressmen said, citing Thailand, Australia and Brazil among such countries.