Reacting to the persistent talk of pushing through with Charter change without the Senate's participation, Senator Panfilo Lacson said Tuesday “it smells worse than a week-old shit from an unflushed toilet of a congressman suffering from colon cancer.”
Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez on Monday said he would push for the postponement of the 2019 midterm elections to enable a smooth transition toward the proposed federal form of government.
He said the House alone—and even without the Senate—could work on the amendments to the 1987 Constitution, and that only three-fourths of the votes of all members of Congress was enough to approve the proposal. He claimed the Charter does not explicitly state that the voting should be done separately.
Senator Bam Aquino on Tuesday said he and fellow senators, either from the opposition or the administration, would not allow the railroading and bastardization of the process of changing the 1987 Constitution.
In his Twitter account, Lacson said “this doltish notion of revising the Charter via con-ass, con-con, or even people’s initiative without the Upper Chamber’s participation in a bicameral system such as ours smells worse than a week-old shit from an unflushed toilet of a congressman suffering from colon cancer."
He made his remarks Lacson’s a day after Alvarez floated the idea of scrapping the 2019 elections through a people’s initiative.
Alvarez insisted that the cancellation of the midterm elections in 2019 would give Congress more time to pursue the Cha-Cha initiative.
“It would be better if the Senate and the House can agree on this matter," he said.
"But if not, I hope this would not happen, we can simply proceed with the task of deliberating on the draft through a constituent assembly, get the required three-fourths vote and then we submit it to the people for ratification through a referendum."
But Aquino said the Senate had agreed it would not allow any change in the Charter to be railroaded.
Instead of pushing for Charter change, he urged the government to focus on addressing the high prices of goods due to the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion or TRAIN Law.