The biggest hack is amending the Constitution via RBH 6 and 7 – Partido Manggagawa

Filipinos may have kept guard protecting their Facebook accounts from possible hacking, a day after Meta confirmed there was a global outage in its system. What we failed to prevent, however, was the biggest political hack when the House of Representatives’ Committee of the Whole passed Resolution of Both Houses No. 7 (RBH7) Wednesday.

 

Partido Manggagawa (PM) Secretary General Judy Ann Miranda, said the haste in approving RBH 7 at the House of Representatives, “Is equivalent to a political hack which is unthinkable for a huge political body known for being laggard and protracted in its lawmaking process, especially when it comes to important social development agenda.”

 

Miranda cited as an example the lengthy years of enacting the reproductive health bill, which took 14 years, and now on the proposed divorce law, and right to safe and affordable abortion even for special cases. 

 

“Kapag para sa kababaihan, history book ang trato sa amin ng mga mambabatas. Pero kapag charter change para sa dayuhan, para silang Facebook, Twitter, o Tiktok sa pabilisang gumalaw,” lamented Miranda, as PM joined protest actions in the Senate with the World March of Women, and in Manila with In Defense of Human Rights and Dignity (iDefend) Movement, which is all part of the celebration of the International Women’s Day.

 

The same is true, she added, when it comes to the proposed wage hike legislation, with the last legislated wage hike enacted by Congress was in 1989. “When it comes to another agenda like charter change, which is an alien concern to most Filipinos, our lawmakers get fast and furious.”

 

Like RBH 6 now pending before the Senate, RBH 7 proposes to amend several economic provisions in the 1987 Constitution, particularly on areas covering public services, education, advertising, and land ownership, among others.

 

Once approved separately by both houses through a ¾ vote, the “unless otherwise provided by law” shall be added to all the sections under several articles of the Constitution that Congress so decides to be amended, particularly Article XII (Section 11), Article XIV (paragraph 2 of Section 4), and Article XVI (paragraph 2 of Section 11).

 

But Mirada emphasized, “changing those sections and articles of the Constitution won’t alter the age-old problems of poverty and discrimination confronting women today, which are more of an outcome of society’s capitalistic structure where social wealth is appropriated among the tiny few while governance is run under a dynastic political rule.” 

07 March 2024