Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
Albay Representative Edcel Lagman on Friday hit back at the House leadership after one of its members accused those opposing the controversial death penalty bill of “bullying” the majority bloc.
Lagman said the leadership “is arrogantly absolving itself of its sins of suppressing the right of free expression and debate in its unconscionable haste in passing the death penalty bill on second reading by accusing the oppositors of bullying the majority.”
“Since when has a small authentic minority oppressed the ascendant majority?” he argued.
READ: ‘House reduced into chamber of bullies, puppets’
Lagman pointed out that it is the majority or the House leadership that “dictates, albeit with unreasonable alacrity, the tempo of the proceedings.”
“It is the House leadership which interprets the rules, albeit arbitrarily; and it is the House leadership that stifles dissent,” he said.
Lagman listed down the instances when the House leadership supposedly attempted to railroad the death penalty bill:
a) Transgressed the rules and tradition of the House with impunity like including the time consumed by the answering sponsor to the one-hour limit allocated to an interpellator which greatly diminishes the latter’s time;
b) Precipitately terminated the debates even as 18 more interpellators have been listed and announced; and
c) Prematurely closed the period of individual amendments when only three pages of a seven-page text of the bill have been subjected to amendments, which is contrary to the rule that the amendment of the title of a bill is in order “only after amendments to the text thereof have been completed.”
Lagman singled out Majority Leader Rodolfo Fariñas who said his group’s amendments were “not honest-to-goodness.” He said such a comment was “unparliamentary because it imputes malicious motives to the oppositors.”
BACKSTORY: Death penalty bill up for final House approval next week
“The amendments proposed by the oppositors were legitimate and grounded on their advocacy against the reimposition of the death penalty,” Lagman said.
It was Fariñas who said that lawmakers opposing the bill “bullied the majority by introducing amendments that were outrightly unacceptable.” IDL/rga