One hundred years of lassitude

THE good news is that the Congress of the Philippines is celebrating its centennial (reckoned from the inauguration of the Philippine Assembly in 1907) as an institution, marking 100 years of electoral representation and of democratically choosing the nation’s leaders.

The bad news is that Congress, the branch of government tasked to enact laws, has not been fulfilling its legislative mandate, as shown by PCIJ’s Congress report.

As the 13th Congress drew to a close last week, the good news is that there are 64 additional Republic Acts from the 84 we’ve reported in April, bringing the number up to 148.

The bad news is that it’s still a “dismal” showing for an institution that’s supposed to be improving over time. And it’s still 25 laws short of the accomplishments of its immediate predecessor which, until this Congress, had posted the lowest output since the creation of a bicameral legislature.

The legislature, both upper and lower houses, has a budgetary allocation of P12.51 billion devoted solely to lawmaking. If we divide the budget over the laws enacted — P12.51 billion divided by 148 laws — this means that each law costs the Filipino people P84.53 million.

This means, further, that fewer and fewer laws are passed while more and more taxpayers’ money are being allocated for the purpose.

And the even worse news: parochial concerns still dominate. Of the 148 enacted laws, only 45 are of national application while 103 are local laws.

* Budgets for each Congress are computed by adding the full legislative budgets for the first to the second to the last years of each congressional term. The budget of the last year of each term is excluded; instead this is computed as the first year’s budget of the next Congress.
Source: General Appropriations Acts (1946-2007) and Congress of the Philippines

Unable to muster a quorum on its last session day, the House failed to even perform its ministerial duty to ratify the bicameral reports that would have approved bills providing for compensation to human rights victims during martial law, amending the University of the Philippines Charter and the Intellectual Property Code by introducing innovations to make medicines more affordable.

Instead, House leaders have been trumpeting the passage of the Human Security Act (RA 9372) as one of the notable accomplishments of the 13th Congress. Ramon Casiple of the Institute for Political and Electoral Reform begs to differ.

“While we took a step forward with the abolition of the death penalty (RA 9346),” says Casiple, “we took 10 steps backward with the passage of the anti-terror law.”