‘Arroyo has last say on minority squabble’
Speaker Gloria Arroyo of Pampanga will have the final say on who will comprise the opposition bloc in the House of Representatives, Rep. Romero Quimbo of Marikina City said on Sunday.
Quimbo, who belongs to the Liberal Party, conceded that it all boils down to the decision of the newly elected Speaker on who are going to be members of the minority bloc in the House of Representatives even if House rules state that Quimbo and 11 other LP lawmakers who did not vote for Arroyo should compose that bloc.
He has been elected as House minority leader by 11 non-Arroyo voters from the LP ranks, and the party has already communicated to Arroyo that these voters are the duly constituted minority bloc.
Quimbo
The speaker has yet to comment on the matter.
“It is going to be the speaker’s call. Whatever we do here, whoever the Speaker wants to recognize as the minority bloc, that is the one who will prevail. If she is going to recognize Congressman [Danilo] Suarez of Quezon as the House minority leader, still, we can’t do anything about that,” Quimbo said in a radio interview.
He and the rest of the LP contend that Suarez and 16 others who are part of the minority group under then-speaker Pantaleon Alvarez of Davao del Norte ousted themselves as the minority bloc under the House rules when they voted for Arroyo as speaker, not once but twice, on July 23, when President Rodrigo Duterte delivered his third State of the Nation Address.
“We call on Congressman Suarez to give Speaker Arroyo a chance to start things right and not to repeat the mistakes of past leadership wherein there was no dissent allowed in the House. Not only did they vote for her, they even campaigned for her. For them to insist [on being the minority]would only give Speaker Arroyo problems,” Quimbo said.
He added that the Liberal Party was ready to be the constructive opposition in Congress.
“We wrote her office not to seek approval, but to inform the head of the institution which is the speaker [under the House rules]. So as far as we are concerned, we already did what we have to do,” Quimbo said.
He added that Suarez cannot say the minority bloc has not been vacated because the vote for the speakership matters in determining the minority bloc.
Rep. Edcel Lagman of Albay said it would be foolhardy for Suarez and his group to insist that the recent House upheaval was a mere change in the position of speaker because a change in leadership automatically carries with it the shifting of alliances and loyalties.
“The change in the speakership did not happen in an isolated vacuum. It was effected through the mobilization of partisan forces, severance of alliances and obliteration of loyalties,” Lagman noted in a statement.
“No less that the Supreme Court in Baguilat vs Alvarez opined that the election of the Speaker will “determine the constituency of the majority and the minority,” he said.
The post ‘Arroyo has last say on minority squabble’ appeared first on The Manila Times Online.