Belmonte: House to sit out Charter change while Aquino’s team studies it

House Speaker Sonny Belmonte. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

The House of Representatives will freeze for now any attempts to amend the Constitution to allow President Benigno Aquino’s economic and legal teams to study the proposals for Charter change brought forth by both Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile and Speaker Feliciano Belmonte.

“We will stop in the meantime (Hinto muna kami). We will wait,” Belmonte told reporters.

The Speaker, however, said the House should be told as soon as a decision had been reached either way by the President.

“We should decide this fairly quickly so if (it’s a) no-go, we can put all our efforts into our other priority measures,” he said.

Enrile and Belmonte met with Mr. Aquino on Monday to try and convince him to support Charter change.

The President reiterated to them his staunch opposition to amending the Constitution.

“I stated my opposition, but we agreed to have the underlying basis studied by the economic and legal clusters [of the Cabinet] and with private sector participation … ” Mr. Aquino told Enrile and Belmonte.

Belmonte said the meeting could be considered a success “in the sense that (the President) did not say ‘no,’ but opted to have the matter studied by his economic and legal teams.

“In that sense, the door is still open,” he said.

Belmonte said he and Enrile both assured Mr. Aquino that any amendments would be limited to economic provisions of the Constitution.

“If other things start getting into the discussion, we will simply see to it that we won’t have the votes to push (them) through,” Belmonte, Enrile and House Majority Leader Neptali Gonzales II reportedly told Mr. Aquino.

The fact that Congress does not seek to convene itself into a constituent assembly (con-ass) to amend the Constitution is a “guarantee” that discussions would not stray from the economic provisions, Gonzales told reporters.

“If we do it the con-ass way, that’s where the danger would come in,” he said.

Gonzales said any amendments would be done through a joint resolution and pertain only to specific provisions. He said that each provision to be amended would require the concurrence of three-fourths of the members of each chamber. In this respect, Belmonte said, the effort would need the President’s backing.

“That in itself will have a check mechanism, because if we insert something there the Senate will not give its imprimatur,” he said, noting that the House could do the same to the Senate.

In the meeting with the President, Belmonte said he and Enrile proposed “about six amendments that can be done, but some of them are not really as urgent as the others.”

Gonzales said Congress could “concede” the amendments seeking to relax ownership of, say, “media and advertising.”