By Maricel Cruz, The Standard

 

The House of Representatives on Wednesday failed to resume its deliberations on the Palace-backed Bangsamoro Basic Law because of the absence of quorum for the past six session days.

 

At the Senate, a committee report on the BBL was to be submitted  on August 11, Senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said on Wednesday.

 

Buhay party-list Rep. Lito Atienza chided  the House leadership for its perennial quorum problem. “This is illegal and immoral,” Atienza said, referring to persistent quorum problem in the House.

 

At Wednesday’s   session, only a handful of lawmakers showed up at the session hall.

 

The House failed to muster a quorum after President Aquino III delivered his State of the Nation Address (SONA) last July 27.        

 

The third regular session of the 16th Congress opened on the same day of the President’s SONA, with more than 200 lawmakers present -- enough number to muster quorum.

 

But House Majority Leader and Mandaluyong Rep. Boyet Gonzales said the quorum problem in the House has been a ‘tradition.’

 

Gonzales pointed out that during the first session weeks of the resumption of Congress, lawmakers are still busy attending to their constitutionally mandated constituency.

 

But he said when deliberations on the 2016 budget comes, lawmakers are expected to attend religiously the sessions.

 

The proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law was supposed to be deliberated in the House plenary session last Tuesday.            

 

Meanwhile, Marcos, chair of the local government committee,  said he gave a “third party monitoring team  a sneak preview of the substitute Bangsamoro Basic Law   before he submits its committee report to the Senate on August 11.  

 

“I promised that I would have the committee report   on Monday. I will sponsor the substitute bill within a day or two and I will provide the senators copies of the substitute bill for them to study. Then we will come back, maybe the next week, and the interpellation process will begin,” Marcos said in a statement.

 

The 5-man Third Party Monitoring team was created in 2013 to evaluate and monitor the implementation of the signed peace agreements between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

 

Led by its chairman, former European Ambassador to the Philippines Alistair MacDonald, the TMPT met with Marcos to inquire on the progress of BBL deliberations in the Senate. Other members of TPMT are Rahib Kudto, Huseyin Oruc, Steven Rood and Karen Tañada.

 

Marcos invited the TPMT to the room where he and his legislative staff were meeting to finalize the substitute bill and showed them that his proposed amendments were actually based on the draft BBL.

 

To hasten the process, Marcos said the senators agreed in their caucus    to have the debates on the floor rather than the usual route of debating at the committee level before the plenary discussions.

 

“I have never stopped working on this―it’s been close to a year. We were working on it even during the break,” he stressed.      

 

In crafting the substitute BBL, he tried to adhere to the spirit of FAB and the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro (CAB), on which the draft BBL was based.

 

“The underlying principle of our decision has always been, if we can give it to them, give it to them. If it’s illegal, we can’t give it to them no matter how much we may want to. If it’s unconstitutional, we can’t do that either. If it’s impossible to administer, then there’s no reason to do it because there’ll be chaos,” Marcos said.

 

Likewise, Marcos said that in amending the draft BBL, he and his legislative team ensured not to reduce anything from what is already in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).

 

“If ever, we can enhance, but we cannot diminish from ARMM. So the provisions in terms of power sharing, in terms of shares in national wealth, in terms of local shares, none of them are lower and some are higher than ARMM,” he said.

 

According to Marcos, extensive discussions on the constitutional issues against the draft BBL helped them address these problems.

 

What proved quite difficult, according to Marcos, was finding principles to follow in the provisions on power-sharing and on devising a scheme on economic wealth sharing.

 

Among others, Marcos said they had to define the principle of “asymmetric relationship” to mean that the relationship between the Bangsamoro government and the national government is asymmetric or not similar to the relationship between regular local government units and the national government.

 

In addition,    they recognized the need for the block grant to the Bangsamoro government as necessary to help it start toward true fiscal autonomy, but that this has to be temporary and backed with checks and balances to ensure the funds would be used properly.

 

Marcos added the substitute bill will likewise include provisions to strengthen the weapons decommissioning process.

 

However, Marcos told the TPMT that he cannot predict how long the floor debates on the BBL could last since he expects most senators to raise questions on the provisions of the substitute bill. -- With Macon Ramos-Araneta