The Bicameral Conference Committee of the Senate and the House of Representatives has been used since 1986 to oppress the Filipino people.
Dr. Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo, the 18th president of the University of the Philippines, who passed away last 19 December, was a distinguished political scientist and scholar known for his fearless views on Philippine society, politics and international affairs.
In one of our late evening graduate school classes on Public Administration and Social Systems at the University of the Philippines on Padre Faura, Manila, between 1967 and 1970, he said the bicameral conference committee, which granted to select lawmakers huge stashes of cash and special privileges, was a political practice conducted yearly that brought suffering to millions of Filipinos.
Political scientists call the bicam the Scourge of Philippine Society.
No wonder political philosophers and leading French revolution theoretician Jean Rousseau, commenting on representative government in his book “The Social Contract,” observed that the new lawmakers with the power of the purse merely took over the privilege from the hated aristocrats of old.
For a government that grants to any person the discretion to spend the money of the public encourages the rise of personality-based politics.
But be that as it may, former Budget Secretary Florencio Abad put it most clearly: Pork thrives “in the framework of patronage politics,” and unless we change our politics, the PDAF will always be a necessity.
Or unless we change our government from the present republican democracy, with both a Senate and a House of Representative, to the parliamentary form without a Senate and a House, we won’t be rid of the oppressive bicameral committee.
The Filipino people shall have the Parliament as the only policy-making body for governance. There will be no senators and no congressmen.
The Supreme Court, in reaction to the people’s demand to abolish the pork barrel, came out with a decision striking out the system.
The Court said the practice should “never again be adopted in any system of governance and by any name or form.”
The Supreme Court declared unconstitutional (a) the entire 2013 PDAF Article; (b) all legal provisions of past and present Congressional Pork Barrel Laws such as the previous PDAF and CDF Articles and various Congressional Insertions which authorized legislators — whether individually or collectively in committees — to intervene, assume or participate in any of the various post-enactment stages of the budget process, such as but not limited to the areas of project identification, fund release and/or fund realignment, unrelated to the power of congressional oversight.
But at this time when we are just months away from the midterm elections, we can’t help but suspect the pork barrel will again thrive, in a form outlawed by the Supreme Court — in secrecy and conspiracy.
(To be continued)