A House leader on Wednesday appealed to Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. to abandon his plans of passing an Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) law-based substitute bill for the Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL).
Cagayan de Oro 2nd district Rep. Rufus Rodriguez said this would only create problems in the passage of the proposed law since the House of Representatives’ (HOR) own substitute bill on the BBL, House Bill (HB) no.5811 or the Basic Law of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region (BLBAR) is vastly different from the ARMM law.
“It will be much more difficult [to harmonize the two] because that is a different working bill and we have here a new bill,” said Rodriguez, chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee that approved HB no.5811 in the first place.
The Mindanao lawmaker allayed fears that Marcos may have regarding the unconstitutional provisions of the BBL, saying these have since been corrected in the BLBAR.
“We hope Senator Bongbong will be reconsidering [his plan]…especially they should look at our substitute bill. If his problem is about constitutionality, then I’ll be sending him a copy of the substitute bill,” Rodriguez said rather confidently.
“His privilege speech was about the old, original provisions and we agree with him,” Rodriguez said, referring to the BBL as filed to Congress by Malacañang in September 2014.
MANILA BULLETIN
