ANTI-DIVORCE Rep. Rodante Marcoleta (PL, Sagip) yesterday said he would personally ask Speaker Martin Romualdez if the House of Representatives could again vote on the controversial divorce bill because of questions surrounding the final vote when congressmen approved House Bill No. 9349 on third and final reading on May 22.
“I think we should review it, if our Speaker would allow it. I’m willing to talk to him to ask if we could do it one more time, in order to remove all doubts,” Marcoleta said in Filipino in a forum in Manila.
Marcoleta expressed optimism the House leadership would accede to his request for the House to take another vote on the bill authored by Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman after the House changed the official vote the following day after the voting, amid questions raised by former Senate President Vicente Sotto III.
The official vote initially recorded was 126-109 with and 20 abstentions, prompting Sotto to issue a statement, saying the motion to approve the bill should have been lost because it did not meet the simple majority vote required under the rules.
He said it has always been the practice that a simple “majority vote” is one-half plus one of all lawmakers present during the quorum, including those who abstained. This means that if 255 lawmakers participated in the voting process based on the vote of 126-109 with 20 abstentions, 129 votes were needed to approve the measure.
The next morning, the House announced that the number of affirmative votes was actually 131 and not 126, prompting Marcoleta to say that the correction made it appear that the House was merely “chasing to reach” the majority vote.
Marcoleta also questioned the 20 abstentions, saying it its “very unusual” that so many lawmakers abstained from voting.
POINT MISSED
Rep. Arlene Brosas (PL, Gabriela) appealed to senators opposing the divorce bill to give abused women a chance after Sen. Jinggoy Estrada said the bill will go through the “eye of the needle” in the Senate.
“Lawmakers should base their decisions on the needs of the majority of Filipinos. We shouldn’t turn a blind eye to the alarming cases of domestic violence for the sake of religious dogma,” Brosas said.
Brosas also reacted Estrada’s statement that the divorce bill will not address hunger, saying the bill was never intended to address poverty.
“Sen. Jinggoy Estrada’s assertion that the divorce bill will not address hunger misses the point,” she said. “The proposed bill was never intended to solve poverty; its goal is to provide an accessible and affordable legal avenue for individuals trapped in irreparable and abusive marriages to regain their freedom.”
“The role of the State is to uphold human rights and gender equality, not to entrench patriarchal norms that enable spousal abuse and marital imprisonment of women,” Brosas said.
