“BOTH HOUSES OF THE CONGRESS VOTING SEPARATELY” only appears four (4) times in the 1987 Constitution.

In Summary B, Item No. 2 should be omitted. I apologize if I created confusion.

Bencard, you’re right, only 4 provisions contain the words/phrase.

it becomes parliamentary – voters will still be selling votes, trapos will still be buying votes, corruption still reigns. same o same o.

I know, too, that bigenya would have wished that the Representatives in the case of the present crop of congressmen and congresswomen are those who really represent the people’s sentiments.

Lastly, bigenya did believe that the whole exercise (Con Ass or charter change) would have been meaningless if Senate refuses to pass an equivalent resolution.

All told, the views of bigenya do in fact run counter with those of bencard. In other words, their lines of thought do not really coincide.

1. “when a provision of a constitution or statute is clear, it requires no interpretation. it must be applied according to its plain meaning”.

If you were a resource person, can you really offer the above statement as a very scholarly, very intelligent, and very expertly opinion to justify or rationalize HR 1109?

2. “in an honest debate concerning their (Senate, or senators) continued existence, they would have a difficult time justify their continued stay”

This is the intellectual tragedy

3. And more to this point, he man says further that senators are there to ‘impede, obstruct, prevent a constitutional power to amend or revise it when the situation calls for it, simply by refusing to participate”.

What’s that?

4. And then again, he went on to define public trust by saying: “betrayal of public trust is the hardhearted refusal of the senators who seem to put their job security above the interests of the nation to participate in the process”.

My comment in part, reads: “If we raised sobriety as an issue …”, with of course, emphasis on the word “if” as a conditional syllogistic argument.

This was rebutted with that comment that reads:”and who is raising sobriety as an issue?”.

At the very least, hasn’t the author of the blog,”A call for sobriety” actually raised it as an issue?

Or hear it from bencard himself (oh he shares the same last name with the blogger whom he did not fail to ‘acknowledge’),”i think, let’s have sobriety…”

One can be lost in the maze of useless semantics.

It can be done.

To me, this just shows that the Constitution is a bit sloppy…and hence needs cleaning up. There may have been too much “cut-and-paste”, as I understand different previous constitutions were used as reference/guides. Indeed, I think that some parts were written under the assumption that there would be a unicameral legislature.

Ultimately, despite accusations or emotions, only the SC can decide this specific issue of “seperately or as one?” A pretty standard situation; it happens all the time.

Now, I would pose this question:

If in Summary A and in Summary C (provisions enumerated several comments above) the use of the phrase “all the Members of Congress” are identical, how come “voting jointly” was added in C?

Notice the hierarchy of Summary A to Summary C? A, being the norm, precedes C, which is a deviation to the norm.

Here’s a test — Invert deviation C to become the norm:

Thus, all the Members of the Congress vote jointly. How come in concurring with Amnesty Grants and in passing Tax Exemption…the Congress votes separately?

Constitutional experts have their authoritative way of explaining things. I’ll do it my way…as I understood it.