SPEAKER Pantaleon Alvarez on Wednesday said it is possible that there will be no elections in 2019 if a federal system of government is installed as President Rodrigo Duterte wants.
He added that nothing is impossible if lawmakers work on it.
He said a proposed amendment to the Constitution by way of a constituent assembly could be submitted to a plebiscite simultaneously with barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections on May 14, 2018.
The House is hoping to approve a resolution calling for a constituent assembly this month.
“If we can convene by January, we can submit that to a referendum during the barangay elections by May. If we work on it, nothing is impossible,” Alvarez said.
“Let us be practical. If we shift to a different form of government, unitary to federal, you need a transition government,” Alvarez said of a proposal that could lead to the abolition of the Senate.
Alvarez said senators worried about their political careers would run for election to the new legislature.
He said some senators’ terms expired in 2019 while other would do so in 2022.
“In fareness, maybe it would be better if they all expire in 2022,” he said in Filipino.
But Alvarez acknowledged that convening Congress as a constituent assembly would face rough sailing, particularly over whether the senators and congressmen should vote jointly or separately.
Alvarez said he believed the assembly should vote jointly, a move that would give the House more clout over the Senate.
He said convening Congress as a constituent assembly was a House priority and said he was confident the Senate would cooperate with the effort to advance the President’s legislative agenda.
Davao City Rep. Karlo Nograles, meanwhile, said the House’s hard work in 2017 has allowed it to focus on its mission in 2018 to adopt a federal system of government.
“The primary mission for us lawmakers in the 17th Congress is to usher in a federalized Philippines in 2018,” Nograles said.
“Over 16 million Filipinos gave their stamp of approval to this endeavor when they elected President Rodrigo Duterte who has championed federalism since Day One,” Nograles added.
This developed as Camariñes Sur Rep. LRay Villafuerte welcomed President Duterte’s completion of a 25-member constitutional commission that would propose amendments to the Constitution.
Villafuerte said Alvarez and Senate President Aquilino Pimentel III were set to meet to decide when the two chambers of Congress could convene as a constituent assembly to draft a new Constitution for a federal system of government.
The committee on constitutional amendments of the Lower House of also recently created four technical working groups that would draft a proposed Philippine Federal Constitution.
“All these positive developments mean that the process to shift to federalism is now in full throttle. As I have been saying all along, federalism will only fulfill its goal of redistributing wealth to the countryside if it is accompanied by moves to liberalize the Constitution’s restrictive economic provisions,” Villafuerte said.
Villafuerte also proposed that the Constitution be amended to remove limits to foreign ownership of various sectors of the economy.
Under a constituent assembly, the lawmakers would serve as delegates who will propose amendments to the Constitution. This is in contrast to a constitutional convention in which delegates will be elected.
“This will save the government millions of pesos since we no longer need to elect delegates for the task of amending the Charter. And since we lawmakers have fixed terms, we will have a definite time period to finish the job. This means we will achieve our goal faster. Anyway, all the proposed amendments we will come up with will be subject to ratification by the people. It’s by far the less complicated method,” Nograles said.
“I am hopeful that 2018 would be the year that the Philippines begins its long-awaited journey toward progress via the federalism superhighway,” he added.
