No term extensions

Recent events in Congress have made it painfully clear this legacy of political struggles against the extensive powers of the Executive is still on the backseat, hogtied by quarrels over parochial interests and business.

And — for added emphasis — thousands of “nays” over proposals lawmakers in the lower House get extended terms from the present three years to four or five years.

A contemptuously self-serving move is easily the first objection. And anything reeking of self-interest instead of public interest always makes many of us recoil violently.

Particularly so since congressional shenanigans — and not only in this present Congress — inescapably has the extraordinary capacity to summon despair and inspire fatalism instead of sympathy from the public.

Despair is reasonably apt since how else can we explain the scandalous quarrels over unceasing suspicions that lawmakers are still hopelessly addicted to the pork barrel involving billions of taxpayer’s hard-earned taxes?

Anyway, to be fair, we can permit a small allowance for proponents of term extensions to sugarcoat the move, even if the sugarcoating is strikingly unoriginal.

Cagayan de Oro Rep. Rufus Rodriguez, chair of the Committee on Constitutional Amendments and co-author of the proposal, says the “prevailing sentiment” among his colleagues is that “three years is too short for good work.”

Another co-author, Deputy Speaker Aurelio Gonzales Jr. of Pampanga, further tells us three years is too short for lawmakers to legislate “meaningful reforms, projects and development” in congressional districts.

“The first year is spent on organizing the office and staff and learning the ropes, if you are a neophyte. On the second year, you try to do serious work. On the third year, you begin campaigning for the next elections. So effectively, only one year, or a year-and-a-half at most, is devoted to work,” says Gonzales.

“Good work” here presumes all elected lawmakers and the bevy of cackling partylisters are all “good men.” But, to beg the question, are they? Or are there only a few good men in Congress? The honest answers to these I leave to you dear reader.

As for neophytes learning legislative work only in their first year, does this mean House neophytes are nothing more but OJT (on-the-job-trainees)?

Still, if congressional wannabees are not prepared in crafting laws beneficial to all, what business then do they have in running for public office?

Maybe the word “business” is the best clue here and it has a lot to do with the quarrel over people’s money. Recent events about the budget in Congress furthers my grim conclusions.

I refer here to the approval last week of the House of Representatives of the General Appropriations Bill, which proposes a P4.1 trillion national budget for 2020. In the proposed budget, the House increased its budget by P1.6 billion.

It’s a lot of public money which incensed arch pork barrel critic Sen. Panfilo Lacson, who charged the House was about to allocate P1.5 billion in pork for each of Speaker Allan Peter Cayetano’s 22 deputies. The aborted plan would have also given P700 million worth of projects for all district representatives.

In response, Cayetano shrugged off the Lacson charge as “fake news.” Cayetano insists the House is — snickering laughter aside — not only “anti-pork” and that the additional P1.6 billion budget for the House of Representatives is for the improvement of its research efforts, facilities, and the funding of newly-created committees.

Cayetano is vague about what these researches are, except to say the additional funding would be used to strengthen the Congressional Planning and Budget Office and to create academic fellowships from the professors.

In short, Cayetano has no idea on what researches to fund. Which is a pity since large issues needing extensive research is right under his nose.

Cayetano, for instance, could have taken it upon himself to initiate and fund a massive new study on all the economic and health costs of Metro Manila’s traffic problem. Such a new study could have also led to better solutions to traffic.

As of now everybody is still stuck using a study on Metro Manila’s traffic problem done by the Japanese years ago.

The House could have also unilaterally initiated a massive study on climate change, where a warming world threatens rising sea levels which in turn can have deleterious effects on thousands of our islands, as well as on the safety and livelihood of millions of Filipinos.

On a narrower subject, involving Congress itself, the House could have also embarked on a project about the political history of this country’s legislature.

Done seriously and objectively, the project will, I am pretty sure, cough up the brutal fact that in recent years the country’s legislature has politically deteriorated to the extent Congress has forgotten its foremost institutional memories of political struggles to limit the Executive branch’s massive powers.

Filipino legal and constitutional scholar Leia Castaneda Anastacio is persuasively convincing on this point, noting the present massive powers of the Philippine president is a legacy of the American colonial period.

In that brutal struggle for equal powers Filipino lawmakers like Manuel L. Quezon and Sergio Osmena Sr. conducted ceaseless struggles against their colonial overlords’ — the American governor-general — tight grip on political power.

Filipinos lost to the Americans in that power struggle, so much so the nascent Filipino legislature had no other choice but to concede to a nakedly power imbalance between the legislature and the presidency set down in the 1935 Constitution.

Unfortunately, such power imbalance was carried over, even if the country gained independence, into subsequent Philippine Constitutions, including the present one, allowing Mr. Duterte’s present strongman tendencies.

It goes without saying that recent events in Congress have made it painfully clear this legacy of political struggles against the extensive powers of the Executive is still on the backseat, hogtied by quarrels over parochial interests and “business.”

Even worse, if not held hostage, there’s now a blatant kowtowing by the Legislature to the Executive. A sad fact which all but negates any argument for term extensions.