PRESS RELEASE

                                                                                                                        25 July 2005

 

TANADA TO JDV:  “DO A VILLAR” 

 

Representative Lorenzo “Erin” R. Tanada III (Liberal Party, 4th District, Quezon) thanked Speaker Jose de Venecia for quickly referring the impeachment complaint to the Committee on Justice.

 

“The Speaker will be a great service to this nation if he further does a “Villar-act” of quickly endorsing the impeachment complaint to the Senate once 79 members of the House of Representatives have signed it,” the young Tanada said.  At the moment, 42 Congressmen have signed the impeachment complaint, 37 signatures short of the magic number.

 

Justice Committee Chair Simeon Datumanong and Cong. Rodolfo Antonino (KAMPI, 4th District, Nueva Ecija) insist that since the endorsers didn’t reach 79 upon filing of the complaint, then the Committee on Justice takes jurisdiction of the complaint and it would have to go through the process of having it reviewed for sufficiency in form and substance.  This can be a protracted process. 

 

Villar, Tanada said, didn’t wait for the Committee on Justice to report out the impeachment resolution against former President Estrada.  The moment one-third of the House Members signed the complaint, he endorsed it to the Senate even if the Committee on Justice has yet to report it out.  The Constitution does not bar the Speaker from doing the same.

 

Paragraph 4, Section 3, Article XI of the Constitution reads, ‘In case the verified complaint or resolution of impeachment is filed by at least one-third of all the Members of the House, the same shall constitute the Articles of Impeachment, and trial by the Senate shall forthwith proceed.’

 

But prior to that, he said the framers of the Constitution likewise wanted to safeguard the tyranny of the majority by incorporating Paragraph 3 in the same Chapter.

 

According to former Justice Isagani Cruz in his book ‘Philippine Political Law’, that paragraph can ‘counteract a situation where the majority of the impeachment committee, although less than one-third of the total membership of the House of Representatives, may nullify the will of that number by refusing to endorse the impeachment resolution.’

 

“I think Villar, took the signatures totaling one-third of the total membership of the House as a vote by the Plenary in favor of the impeachment complaint and endorsed it as the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate,” Tanada explained.

 

“Let’s do this quickly, Mr. Speaker.  We owe it to our people to do our Constitutional and moral duty to ferret out the truth.  I have no doubt in my mind that we can quickly gather the additional 37 signatures.  After all, in the Estrada impeachment complaint, there were initially only 20 or so endorsers.  In here, we already have 42,” Tanada pleaded to the Speaker.