“The President has broken his silence and finally endorsed constitutional economic reforms. Senators should at the very least listen. They have been calling on the President to settle the issue. They now got what they are asking for. The prolonged word war between the Senate and the House of Representatives should now hopefully come to an end and start working”, Barbers added.
“We’d like to thank the President for giving us his very clear position on this issue. This should clear the doubts of some Senators, especially from a former party-list colleague that the House wants more than economic reforms to the 37-year-old charter. The President’s remarks is the endorsement we all need to assure the Senate that there is no basis in their accusations against alleged House plan to abolish it or take it out of the equation”, Barbers said.
According to the Surigao del Norte congressman, “now is the time for the Senate – as an institution – to rise above the pathetic name calling and malicious allegations and prove that it is not an obstructionist to the opening up of the domestic economy to the foreign market, where there will be less oligopolies in the country resulting in more competition, with only the Filipino people benefitting”.
“Again, the time to do this was yesterday, we are running out of time and we’re being left behind by our Asian neighbors. To reiterate, this is a risk worth taking because at the end of the day, this will be the subject of a plebiscite, where the Filipino people will have the final say,” Barbers emphasized.
The chairman of the House committee on dangerous drugs insisted that Filipinos, and not Senators, should have the option to choose what economic restrictive amendments they want replaced or retained in the Charter, which for the longest time have hampered the country’s economic growth.
“In this part of the world, democracy reigns and the people are supreme and sovereign – more than anybody, senators or even congressmen, governors or mayors,” the senior administration legislator from Mindanao reiterated.
“As clearly and expressly stated in no uncertain terms in the fundamental law of the land which some Senators have been brandishing and calling sacred – the Philippines is a democratic country with a republican system where ‘sovereignty resides in the people, and all government authority emanates from them’ – is self-explanatory, plain and simple that even a grade one pupil can understand and does not need any other self-serving interpretation. So put your money where your mouth is, so to speak”, Barbers said.
“We remain hopeful that the co-chairs of the Senate Committee on Constitutional Amendments, Senators Robinhood Padilla and Sonny Angara will proceed with dispatch on this call as they made it clear even before any controversy erupted that indeed the Filipino people are the sovereign and that everything necessary to move our country forward is worth looking into, leaving no stone unturned”, Barbers said.
