Drilon’s dilemma: To insert or not to insert

Senate President Franklin Drilon. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines—Did the Supreme Court ruling that struck down the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) or pork barrel also find unconstitutional the legislators’ practice of making budget insertions and realignments during deliberations on the national budget by Congress?

Senate President Franklin Drilon raised the question during the plenary debate on the P2.26-trillion national budget for 2014 as senators discussed the proposed outlay for state universities and colleges and a proposal to realign funds to the Philippine General Hospital.

Drilon said that if the Supreme Court decision effectively barred senators and congressmen from reallocating funds in the proposed budget of the executive branch, “we might as well just approve the budget when it comes to Congress because we cannot have any input on whether or not a particular allocation or a particular budget is sufficient.”

“In the latest case which the Supreme Court decided, my reading is that congressional insertions are not allowed,” Drilon told Sen. Francis Escudero, finance committee chair, during the budget deliberations on Thursday.

Drilon was apparently referring to the part of the Supreme Court decision that nullified “all legal provisions of past and present congressional pork barrel laws, such as the PDAF and the Countrywide Development Fund and the various congressional insertions, which authorized legislators to intervene, assume or participate in any of the various post-enactment stages of the budget execution.”

“Assuming that the good chair of the [finance] committee can find an item in the GAB [General Appropriations Bill] which the committee can now realign to UP [University of the Philippines], is this an insertion which is prohibited by that decision?” Drilon asked.

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