The brazen manipulation and plunder of the national budget over the past three years have drawn the outrage of Filipinos, including Associate Justice Ramon Paul Hernando.
During the recent Supreme Court oral arguments on the consolidated GAA (General Appropriations Act) cases, Hernando admitted to Solicitor General Darlene Berberabe that he had become emotional and made no apologies for it.
He declared his “deep hatred for UAs” not as a personal bias but in reaction to a structure that has invited precisely the kind of large-scale plunder the suitcase scandal represented.
The magistrate broadly referred to reports of government funds being carted away literally in suitcases, cash physically hauled off in a brazen and unprecedented way.
Hernando then offered a legal framework that explains not just how such plunder happens, but why the budget structure itself makes it almost inevitable.
His remedy was proportionate to the problem: a symbolic chainsaw.
“This unconstitutional framework, where UAs are chained to the GAA, is so massive it would not fit inside one suitcase but several. That is why what we need to do is to cut off those chains with a chainsaw,” he said.
Ordinary legislative reform cannot fix a structure that is defective at the constitutional level.
The UA mechanism, in Hernando’s view, must be severed from the GAA entirely, because its very presence in the budget makes corruption structurally guaranteed.
To Hernando, the current budget architecture appropriates money without knowing the source; excludes that money from the official expenditure program Congress votes on; surrenders post-enactment control to the Executive with no clear authorizing officer; and generates pools of discretionary funds so large, in the hundreds of billions of pesos, that they dwarf any accountability mechanism.
According to the justice, the suitcases appeared because the system handed them to the crooks in government and, constitutionally speaking, told them that no one was watching.
Hernando’s chainsaw may be the most honest judicial metaphor because what needs cutting is not just the abuse, but the legal structure that enables the perversion of the national spending plan.
The UA system, in Hernando’s view, is a constitutional abomination that generates pools of money so vast, so loosely governed, and so free from legislative scrutiny that they would not fit in one suitcase. They would need several.
UAs are attached to the GAA, but their financing is not finalized when Congress passes the budget.
A Department of Budget and Management representative confirmed UA releases are triggered post-enactment, only when “excess” revenues materialize.
The UA thus can be considered a breach of the separation of powers.
As Hernando concluded, “Congress’ discretion to determine how much should be appropriated for a particular government activity is absent, contrary to what the Constitution provides.”
It opens the door through which corruption walks in.
By the time UA funds are triggered and released, Congress is out of the picture.
It is the Executive branch, the President, and the DBM Secretary who determine when the excess exists and where it goes.
Hernando pressed this point directly, in line with the petitioners’ argument against the UA’s claim that “congressional discretion becomes surrendered to the Executive department.”
Thus, the puzzle comes together: the cash in those suitcases had to come from somewhere, and that “somewhere” was a system designed to manufacture the very conditions that made it possible.
