If Senate committees are garbage, then trash them

The 14-strong Senate majority has picked chairmanships over 28 committees, offering the remaining eight to the nine-man minority. The latter decline, but not because they see it for what it really is: a bribe. Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel Jr. cries that the eight committees are "leftovers". His confederates have used worse descriptions: "hodgepodge", "minor", "garbage".

If the eight committees are what they’re touted to be, then there’s only one thing to do: abolish them.

Senate President Franklin Drilon says two chairmanships for each of his majority partners are enough. The senators’ workload is heavy, says he. Chairing more than two would be too much of an extra burden. Better to give them to the guys on the other side of the fence, supposedly for shared responsibility. In short, the majority can do without the eight committees.

The minority doesn’t want them either. First-termer Alfredo Lim nearly came to blows with veteran Rodolfo Biazon for calling the majority "greedy" in refusing to hand over some of the "better ones." A fist-fight would have shown who between them has kept better fit since retiring as police-military general, but it would not have diminished the minority’s craving for "fitting" assignments.

At the core of the wrangling is the budget for "minor" committees – a mere P300,000 a month, largely unaudited, for research and operations. Major ones command P450,000 to P500,000, also unaudited. All this, on top of a monthly P1.2 million per senator, whether in the majority or minority, for office overhead and staff, even if he doesn’t hire one. And that stipend is on top of the P200 million in pork that each one gets per year.

The law fixes a senator’s pay at only P40,000 a month. But once in office, they vote themselves raises in the form of allowances. They don’t send this vote to the people. It’s too important an issue to trust to the masses. Indeed, why should senators let the people vote on their money? What do the people know about money, when half of them can’t make ends meet? Oh well, at least the ease of voting themselves pork and perks is one matter that transcends party politics.

Not with the present Senate. There is no effort to conceal the offer of chairmanships as an "incentive" for good behavior. Returning minority member Juan Ponce Enrile veiledly has threatened to give the majority big headaches if they refuse to surrender the high-budget committees. So has minority veteran Edgardo Angara. And Drilon is sufficiently shaking in his boots. He is begging his majority team to play basketball, as Panfilo Lacson has suggested. That is, for the 14 majority men to first dribble 14 chairs, then let the nine minority counterparts pick their own, and finally retain what’s left for the majority – one basket shot at a time.

Drilon and Lacson presume that NBA-style is better than the old winner-take-all. In years past, the majority used to hog all chairmanships. The minority contented itself with nothing, as the price of "fiscalizing". At times, the majority would flick one chairmanship over to a "cooperative" independent or minority member. But that depended on their generosity, in the same way that they can create new committees with new unaudited funds, if there weren’t enough to go around for them. The minority only looked with quiet envy while the majority feasted on the spoils.

Today, they want equal sharing of spoils. But it doesn’t jibe with the call of the day for austerity, in the light of budget deficits. Scrapping the eight unwanted committees would save the people P28.8 million a year – enough to build 288 new classrooms a year, too.

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Like I wrote, the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency is suspicious of reward claims for four big police drug busts last year, thus discouraging tipsters and operatives (Gotcha, 2 Aug. 2004). The busts were on shabu labs and warehouses in Horseshoe Village, Quezon City; Tanza, Cavite, Lancaster Homes, Pasay; and Marina Bay Homes, Parañaque.

PDEA chief Anselmo Avenido says in reaction that, in the Horseshoe case, two reward claims were submitted by two colonels of the PNP-Anti Illegal Drugs Special Operating Task Force. Yet both gave no civilian claimants. Field reports on the three others never mentioned informers either. "Instead, the reports had such statements as ‘the successful anti-illegal drugs operation is the result of document analysis and intelligence work’, or ‘the raid was the product of extensive research and surveillance by the AIDSOTF team’," Avenido says. "These raised doubts in the minds of reward committee members on whether the operations resulted from information provided by informers, or information elicited by operatives from the suspects themselves. The former will fall under the coverage of the reward system, while the latter will not. Operation Private Eye is for civilian informants and not for law enforcement personnel."

Still, Atty. Rey Bagatsing is appealing to PDEA in behalf of the four supposed informers, code-named "Big Brother", "Magdangal", "Jimboy" and "AB". He has presented them to the committee, although hooded to conceal their identities. The members demanded that they remove the face covers, but the four refused. Thus, the continuing impasse over the claims.

PDEA has given out P5.53 million in rewards to other informants, and has P49.45 million left for future tipsters. The charity sweepstakes office has blocked off P1 billion to entice civilians to turn in drug distributors and street pushers in their locales.

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Catch Sapol ni Jarius Bondoc, Saturdays at 8 a.m., on DWIZ (882-AM).

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