Solon urges House leadership to drop Cha-cha amid COVID-19 spike

Camarines Sur Representative Luis Raymund “LRay’ Villafuerte on Saturday urged the House leadership to abandon plans on charter-change or “Cha-cha,” and instead focus on addressing the spike in new COVID-19 cases.

In a statement, Villafuerte appealed to House Speaker Lord Allan Velasco to “quit this seeming obsession with Cha-Cha and be at the wheel instead of efforts for legislators to do their part in helping the Duterte administration implement its inoculation program by, for instance, being in the thick of information drives in their respective districts to persuade targeted vaccinees to get their jabs once the vaccines become available.”

“The OCTA Research group fret that the daily infection rate could go up to an alarming 10,000 to 11,000 by end-March in Metro Manila, the anti-Covid task force has implemented or is considering stricter mobility restrictions, and hospitals are getting full with coronavirus patients,” Villafuerte said.

“I am flummoxed by the fact that all that the House leadership seems to be thinking of at this time is to keep the Speaker’s Cha-Cha initiative on overdrive,” he added.

The lawmaker said the House leadership appears to be in denial that the coronavirus situation has taken a turn for the worse—and should be the chamber’s No. 1 concern right now—because Cha-cha remains on the frontburner even if the latest COVID-19 surge has reached a point where Velasco himself last week placed the Batasan complex on a four-day lockdown in response to the rocketing number of cases in the metropolis and neighboring provinces.

“Travel bans, curfews and checkpoints are back; the DTI (Department of Trade and Industry) has shuttered driving schools, gaming arcades and museums, and reduced the capacities of restaurants, cafes and DOT (Department of Tourism)-accredited establishments; churches are back to 30% capacity; and the DOH is considering sending patients to Southern and Central Luzon hospitals amid the swelling Covid bed occupancy rate of hospital ICUs (intensive care units) in Metro Manila,” Villafuerte said.

“And all that the House leadership seems to be concerned about is for the House and Senate to pass the Speaker’s proposed amendments to the 1987 Constitution before the year is over.”

He said the Cha-cha initiative looked like a futile political exercise, in the first place, because Senate President Vicente Sotto III and other Senate leaders had recently said that constitutional reform was not their priority amid the pandemic.

“So why is the House still squandering its time and energy on this Cha-Cha initiative that already looks dead in the water?’ he asked.

Rather than wrongly focusing on fast-tracking the congressional approval of the Velasco-sponsored Resolution of Both Houses (RBH) No. 2, which proposes amendments to economic provisions in the Constitution, he said the Speaker and his adjutants should prod House members to support or initiate measures in their districts to help Malacañang meet its original target of immunizing 70 million Filipinos or 100% of the country’s adult population by end-December 2021.

“To increase vaccine acceptance, legislators should initiate or join information campaigns in their districts to persuade would-be vaccinees that the vaccines are safe, and are necessary to eventually contain the pandemic and accelerate the country’s recovery from the ruinous economic impact of Covid-19,” he said.

The lawmaker pointed out that a faster vaccine takeup was necessary for the country to attain herd immunity, which, in turn, would be the only way to check the pandemic, restore business confidence and boost consumer spending, and drive the economy back to its -pre-pandemic growth momentum. 

Villafuerte said that he had long advocated for constitutional reform, particularly the lifting of the Charter’s economic provisions that restrict foreign participation in certain businesses. But he believed it was the wrong time to pursue it as this highly divisive issue would only sidetrack national focus and attention from the country’s exigent concerns of pandemic response and economic recovery. — DVM, GMA News