Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr.: I would rather continue working under the Chief Executive, as a colleague, rather than under somebody who looks at me with suspicion, as a self-serving guy. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
(First of two parts)
After the House of Representatives adjourned in the evening of June 10, reporters swarmed around Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr., asking him why he did not call a vote on his bill that would introduce amendments to the economic provisions of the Constitution.
The measure had been widely expected to pass on third reading, but Resolution of Both Houses 1 was not even tabled.
Belmonte explained that the bill did not have the numbers to win the chamber’s approval.
But there was another reason: Belmonte did not want to offend President Aquino.
“It didn’t look to me like the wisest thing I could do to pass something I liked and then fail to pass something he liked,” Belmonte said in an interview with the Inquirer.
At that point, the House had already failed to meet its deadline to pass the proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) in spite of the President and his lieutenants practically moving heaven and earth to get it enacted.
“Maybe our relationship would have soured at that time,” Belmonte said. “Although I could crow to the people I was able to do this and that, I would rather continue working under the Chief Executive, as a colleague, rather than under somebody who looks at me with suspicion, as a self-serving guy.”
Rubber-stamp Congress
The Speaker’s candid admission illustrates how Aquino has towered over the House of Representatives in the past five years, a dynamic that has made some critics describe the legislature as his rubber stamp.
In the 15th and the current 16th Congress, most of the priority bills pushed by Aquino have been introduced, debated and passed into law, varying only in the speed of passage.
The executive, said Bayan Muna Rep. Neri Colmenares, “has tightened its grip on the legislature in the last five years.”
Per Colmenares’ count, the Aquino administration has achieved a batting average of 11 out of 14 priority measures passed.
In July 2011, during his second State of the Nation Address (Sona), the President promised just compensation for victims of martial law. He signed this into law in February 2013.
In 2012, he asked Congress to pass a sin tax law. This was done within the span of a few months and in spite of the powerful tobacco lobby. That same year, he asked for a reproductive health bill, a contentious bill that had seen failure in previous Congresses due to opposition from the Catholic Church.
Yet the legislature delivered it to him for signing that very December.
The next year, Aquino wanted amendments to the cabotage law. On Tuesday, he signed the new law, along with the Fair Competition Act, another economic reform measure considered a centerpiece law under his administration.
Other landmark pieces of legislation Aquino has successfully pushed include the Kasambahay Law for domestic helpers, the conversion of the basic education curriculum to K-12, amendments to the antimoney laundering law, and the extension of the military’s modernization program.
“We look like a rubber stamp,” said Navotas Rep. Toby Tiangco, president of the United Nationalist Alliance.
Budget always passed
Nowhere else is this more evident than in how Congress has approved the Aquino budget over the half-decade the President has been in office, Tiangco said.
Under Aquino’s administration, Congress has not failed even once to pass the national budget, or the General Appropriations Act (GAA)—something Belmonte is proud of.
Over the past five years, the budget submitted by Aquino’s economic managers has practically been the same one that’s enacted by Congress, with few or virtually no changes at all.
But Belmonte said this was better than failing to pass the budget because of pointless nitpicking and fault-finding.
It is also better than having a reenacted budget, he said.
Deputy Majority Leader Sherwin Tugna, the representative from the party-list Cibac, said the success of the Aquino administration in getting priority bills passed was a “tangible measure of the President’s political will.”
But what about Congress’ oversight function?
Belmonte said he understood the role of the legislature to look over possible excesses on the part of the other government branches, which was why, under his leadership, all committees in the House were now authorized to launch congressional inquiries, even without his go-signal.
Tugna said the House was running under a “paradoxical system.”
On the one hand, legislators belonging to the majority coalition are expected to vote according to party lines. On the other hand, they also need to take cognizance of their responsibility to check and balance the executive and the judiciary.
Tugna said: “When legislators from the ruling party go to the plenary floor, they adopt two personas: as members of the Liberal Party and as fiscalizer. You have to strike a balance.”
‘Moral suasion’
In the absence of the pork barrel, or the Priority Development Assistance Fund, which was nullified by the Supreme Court in 2013, the only incentive for majority lawmakers was the President’s “moral suasion,” he said, adding, “But this does not include contentious bills.”
Generally, Tugna said, the members of the majority vote according to the party position “except when the bill may affect their winnability in the next elections.”
This is also partly the reason the BBL has become so controversial in the current Congress.
The plenary will resume debate on the BBL after the President’s Sona. The new deadline for approval is before the last quarter, when the House becomes preoccupied with deliberations on the 2016 budget.
A measure intended to end decades of conflict in the Muslim communities of Mindanao, the BBL will be the “most defining moment,” if the House manages to approve it, Tiangco said.
But Belmonte said he would not attach that great an importance to the BBL in assessing the performance of Congress under the Aquino presidency.
“In the 16th Congress, it is one of the most important pieces of legislation, but it’s not the be-all and end-all,” he said.
He said there were more lawmaking “bottlenecks” in the 16th Congress compared with the previous one precisely because of the BBL, which pushed other priority laws to the back burner.
Besides the proposed Bangsamoro law, a few other priority measures of the administration have seen little progress.
Measures seeking the rationalization of mining revenues and of fiscal incentives are languishing at the committee level.
Bills that would introduce reforms in land administration and amendments to the Build-Operate-Transfer Law are still pending on the appropriations committee, presumably encountering some difficulty in finding funds.
The proposed whistle-blowers protection law and Witness Protection Act amendments are waiting to be calendared and debated on the plenary floor.
The same is true of the controversial Freedom of Information (FOI) bill, which is technically not a priority measure, as Aquino has never officially asked Congress for it.
Tiangco said that if the FOI bill, which would open important government files to public scrutiny, was considered a priority legislation, the 16th Congress should find no difficulty in passing it.
“It is one bill they would have been able to pass, if they sincerely wanted to,” he said.
Belmonte said he remained hopeful that the FOI bill would be passed, although he “cannot give any guarantees.”
“Let us see if the President mentions it in his last Sona,” he said.
Easygoing relationship
Belmonte described the interplay between the executive and the legislature as “an easygoing working relationship.”
In the 15th Congress, he recalled, “they gave us a long list of their preferences, and the comment of some senators and some congressmen, including myself, was ‘this is purely executive agenda, not an executive-legislative agenda.’”
“It took us a couple of hours discussing it, and we ended up finishing their agenda, not our own,” he said, laughing.
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