As expected, a very strong message from a unanimous Supreme Court on the PDAF and a near unanimous court on the Malampaya fund case where the court declared unconstitutional the discretion of the president to use the fund for non-energy projects. In my view, the latter has to be strictly construed and not include such spending that is tangentially related to energy development. Interestingly, as I have written many times, the court declared unconstitutional all lump sum allocations for and all congressional insertions by legislators. In my view, these lump sum allocations and congressional insertions allowed the legislators to intervene in projects and essentially enabled the PDAF corruption schemes. With this decision, the Supreme Court has corrected a major breach in separation of powers, favoring the Congress, that has been going on for awhile. I wonder thought whether the manner by which the current budget was arrive at where there is no lump sum for legislators but where each was given a chance to submit projects would pass the test laid down by the court in their PDAF decision. Next in line is the DAP; at issue there is also separation of powers but this time in favor of the executive - whether the DAP encroached into legislative authority on the budget will be the highlight of that case. I predict, based on the oral arguments and because the case here rests more on facts than law (whether DAP comes for savings and whether items augmented are in the budget already) that the decision on the DAP will not be unanimous and that it will be a divided court on this one.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 09:20:12 +0000