The House leadership is arrogantly absolving itself of its sins of suppressing the right of free expression and debate in its unconscionable haste in passing the death penalty bill on second reading by accusing the oppositors of bullying the majority.
Since when has a small authentic minority oppressed the ascendant majority?
It is the majority leadership that dictates, albeit with unreasonable alacrity, the tempo of the proceedings; it is the House leadership which interprets the rules, albeit arbitrarily; and it is the House leadership that stifles dissent.
Emboldened by the pressured support of the supermajority, the House leadership had:
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Transgressed the rules and tradition of the House with impunity like including the time consumed by the answering sponsor to the one-hour limit allocated to an interpellator which greatly diminishes the latter’s time;
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Precipitately terminated the debates even as 18 more interpellators have been listed and announced; and
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Prematurely closed the period of individual amendments when only three pages of a seven-page text of the bill have been subjected to amendments, which is contrary to the rule that the amendment of the title of a bill is in order “only after amendments to the text thereof have been completed.”
The amendments proposed by the oppositors were legitimate and grounded on their advocacy against the reimposition of the death penalty.
The labeling by Majority Leader Rodolfo Fariñas that the amendments were “not honest-to-goodness” is unparliamentary because it imputes malicious motives to the oppositors.
The hallmark of a deliberative assembly of untrammelled free debate has been sacrificed to the gallows in the wake of the precipitate approval of H.B. No. 4727 on second reading.
EDCEL C. LAGMAN