Can we still trust Congress after?

It matters not who cried first: the senators, that congressmen were conspiring to sneak back their pork during the bicam; or the congressmen, that senators simply were caught by one of their own realigning P1.3 billion in intelligence funds into their own barrels. It’s more than a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The brouhaha over the Senate’s sudden passage of the House of Representatives’ 2005 budget version is all about money–our money, close to a trillion of it–of which they intend to partake as usual. Just that, this time things crassly got out of hand because both chambers appear to have lost large chunks of their pork. So the question that arises is: can we still trust Congress after this mess?

Not that we trusted them to begin with. Not fully.

For one, there were always doubts in our mind about their intentions in office. A linguist was so precise in listing the three least credible sentences in the English language: (1) "The check is in the mail"; (2) "Of course I’ll respect you in the morning"; (3) "I’m from Congress and I’m here to help you". We’ve always been tempted to ask, "Help us how, by using our money?"

There were suspicions too about their motives for those endless inquiries "in aid of legislation". "In aid of reelection", we put it politely, which really meant not just the publicity mileage they get from fiery privileged speeches, but more the moneyed interests they promote.

We never really trusted legislators with the budget too. They’ve billed every annual national appropriation as "developmental". But where is the economic or social development in allotting half of it to debt interests, another 40 percent to bureaucrat salaries and office maintenance, and only less than a tenth to infrastructures? In typically Congress logic, legislators spend a fortune each year trying to cut spending. And the budget isn’t a vote they send to the people. For them, it’s too important a matter to trust to the masses. Besides, why should they let people vote on their money? What do we know about money, since most of us can’t make ends meet?

And we certainly never trusted them with pork barrels. It’s amazing how they managed to vote themselves pork hikes–from P12.5 million per congressman and P30 million per senator in the restored Congress of 1987, to P70 million and P200 million, respectively, today. All for the sake of their poor constituents, they invoked. In the 18 years since, those constituents no longer are poor but poorer. They’ve sunk from having galunggong for viand to instant noodles to top their stinky rice with. They are less proficient in math and science. They have less jobs and homes and hopes. Their children are underweight as ever. All this, while our senators and congressmen have used up and despoiled our natural resources. Still, they fight over pork.

Sure, for a while there we thought we could trust them at last. In the face of fiscal crisis only months ago, they tried to outdo each other in offering to cut their pork. "Shared sacrifice," they intoned, volunteering to sign group resolutions in their blood. The few who refused to give up all or chunks of pork vowed to clean it up. There were promises of tedious but satisfactory line-item budgeting. They would identify their pork intentions beforehand, they said, then let the implementing agencies bid out the work and supply contracts to avoid any more murmurs of kickbacks. But after the people cooperated to pay more taxes, after schoolchildren saved up on their baon to donate to the cash-strapped government, the legislators forgot the agreed shared sacrifice. We’ve done our part working overtime to pass new taxes, they said, now it’s your turn to pay it. So much for the Spanish proverb that if you would make a thief honest, you need to trust him.

So we now have this fight over pork, a fight really among incorrigible boys and girls caught with their hands in the cookie jar. And because of it, congressmen are aching to abolish senators, while one of the latter advises mass hara-kiri. But how can they do that, when the Japanese tradition is performed only as an act of honor by the Bushido class? It is said that some things must be believed before they can be seen. But we’ve seen enough. The senators and congressmen and the seppuku proponent were all still there the morning after. And they will be there as sure as death and taxes.

Now realizing they have lost our remaining trust, they are striving to explain away their actions with lofty intentions: the congressmen, that they snubbed the bicam only to make senators relent to their supposed superior version of the new VAT Law; the senators, because they wanted to pass a budget before end-March. It’s all mindless chattering of course. They only prove Will Rogers’s lament about legislators: "They’re like animals in a zoo. You can’t do anything about ‘em. All you can do is stand and watch ‘em."

And so we ask, can we still trust Congress after this? Yes we can, but it will take us a lot of pretending that we were born yesterday.

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FOLLOW-UP: To my question if a judge who already recused from a kidnapping case change his mind and retake it for trial (Gotcha, 2 Mar.2005), Judge Robert Cawed of San Fernando, La Union, was straightforward in his order the following day:

"A national columnist raised a very valid issue on the decision of this Presiding Judge to recall the records of a celebrated case where earlier he inhibited himself. As it is the interest of all parties to have this case move and in order to avoid any delay, this Judge returns the records of the case to the Clerk of Court for disposition."

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