DEPUTY Speaker Rolando Andaya recently disclosed that each member of the House of Representatives and Senate received budgetary allocations of P80 million and P200 million, respectively. If this is not a shameless admission of congressional pork, we don’t know what is.
Of course, the representative from the 1st District of Camarines Sur denied that the said funds could be deemed as “pork barrel.” But really, our legislators were skirting from the unanimous 2013 Supreme Court ruling which declared the unconstitutionality of congressional pork at the height of controversies involving Janet Lim-Napoles.
Congressmen claimed that the allotments were in line with line item budgeting of the Budget department and was authorized by House Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Really now?
Our legislators are making a fool out of the tax-burdened public. We know all too well that they intervene in the budgetary processes to finance their pet projects, which allegedly caters to the needs of their constituents but also, as is obvious, to consolidate their control over political power via patronage politics. They help each other out.
Lawmakers brazenly defying a lawful order by the Supreme Court is sickening, if not troubling. By remaining in power through the trickle down of pork to their constituents, they are not doing their job as legislators that enact laws for the welfare of the people.
The deafening silence of the 292-member Lower House on the issue of congressional pork points to a besmirched institution that is teeming with defects. Really, only Sen. Panfilo Lacson spoke publicly against the discretionary funds of the members of the Senate.
The Supreme Court, in its landmark decision, broadly defined as illegal, “…congressional insertions which confer or conferred personal, lump sum allocations to legislators from which they are able to fund specific projects which they themselves determined”. Among those deemed prohibited under the ruling are “all informal practices of similar import and effect…”
The budgetary insertions made by the legislative branch would fall under the definition of “pork barrel” by the high court.
We are thus not surprised by the public perception that the Batasan is a house of “representa-thieves.”
