A viral tweet on the passage of a bill making the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) mandatory for Grade 11 and 12 students is misleading. While the House of Representatives did approve the measure, it happened three years ago in the 17th Congress. The bill remains pending in both the House and the Senate in the current Congress.
Netizen Gerry Cacanindin posted on May 19 a graphic taken from ManilaBulletin’s May 20, 2019 Facebook post following the approval that day of House Bill 8961 or the bill seeking to revive mandatory ROTC.
Although the House of Representatives passed the proposal on third and final reading in the 17th Congress, its counterpart measure in the Senate did not go beyond second reading until Congress closed session on May 27, 2019.
The current Congress has not passed the 22 mandatory ROTC bills in the House and seven in the Senate, all of which are pending at the committee level. The 18th Congress is scheduled to reconvene on May 23 and will be spending days canvassing the votes for president and vice president. Its session will end on June 3.
