Deal on House leadership won’t delay budget – lawmaker

MANILA, Philippines — Is there a looming showdown between rival factions in the House of Representatives as lawmakers scramble to pass the P4.5-trillion budget for 2021 by November?

The question arose on Sunday as Speaker Alan Peter Cayetano expressed his intent to have the spending bill approved “in record time” on a two-month timetable amid preparations for the turnover of the House leadership from the Taguig lawmaker to his presumptive successor, Marinduque Rep. Lord Allan Velasco.

The chair of the House appropriations committee, ACT-CIS Rep. Eric Yap, expressed optimism that there would be no unnecessary conflict between the two House leaders.

“I am confident that the entire budget proceedings in the House will not be affected by whatever agreement there is between the Speaker [Cayetano] and [Representative] Lord Velasco,” Yap told the Inquirer.

“They are both professionals as our colleagues in the House,” he added.

Term-sharing deal

In July 2019, the race for the speakership became heated and ugly as several candidates vied for the position.

Cayetano, of the Nacionalista Party, and Velasco, of the Partido Demokratiko Pilipino-Lakas ng Bayan, emerged as the top candidates and entered into a term-sharing deal brokered by President Duterte himself.

Under their “gentleman’s agreement,” Cayetano would serve as Speaker for the first 15 months of the 18th Congress, while his rival would take over for the last 21 months.

The transition is supposed to take place in October or early November.

In recent months, however, the Speaker’s allies floated the idea of scrapping the deal, while Cayetano prevaricated, saying he would not renege on it but would let the majority decide.

Over the weekend, the House released the schedule of the appropriations committee hearings on the budget from Sept. 4 to Sept. 15.

“It’s a very ambitious schedule to send it right away to the Senate, because we hope that, for the first time in history, if I’m not mistaken, we can sign the budget maybe late November or mid-November as a sign of unity by our country,” Cayetano said in a statement.

Yap acknowledged the difficulty of holding marathon hearings amid the COVID-19 crisis.

“Considering the pandemic that we are facing, it will be a challenge to hold the budget hearings like how we did in the past,” he said in a Viber message.

“But we are ready, we have to be creative and adapt and we will hit the ground running on Day 1,” Yap said.

Scrambling for spoils

Rivalries in the 302-member chamber have at times complicated or delayed the passage of the budget, considered by many as the most crucial function of Congress.

In 2018, the approval of the 2019 budget was delayed for months as a result of last-minute insertions by the new House leadership under then-Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who had staged a coup against Davao del Norte Rep. Pantaleon Alvarez.

The scrambling for spoils escalated to a feud between the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Cabinet, leading to a reenacted budget for the first four months of 2019 and setting back economic growth.

The President finally signed the 2019 budget in April 2019 but vetoed P95.3 billion worth of funds inserted by House lawmakers.

The next year, the 2020 budget approval process was smoother under Cayetano’s leadership. But while the President did not veto items, he tasked his budget managers with reviewing P84 billion worth of congressional insertions before releasing them to the lawmakers.