Amid controversies surrounding the delay in the passage of the 2019 national budget, Camarines Sur Rep. Rolando G. Andaya Jr. on Monday stepped down as majority leader to head the House Committee on Appropriations.
Andaya has nominated Deputy Speaker Fredenil Castro of Capiz as a new majority leader and chairman of the House Committee on Rules, who “will assume that task, and other responsibilities that go with the position, but in a manner better than I had done it.”
Andaya, in his speech, said there is one unfinished major business left, and that is the passage of the 2019 national budget.
“The duty of preparing this annual catalogue falls upon us. The duty to apportion tax payments falls on us. The division of labor, when it comes to appropriations, is that the Executive proposes, and Congress disposes,” he said.
“This is the next field of assignment I want to volunteer to. I have done my part in the rules committee. From the perch of the majority leader, I would like to go down and be involved in settling the great unfinished business of this House—the national budget,” he added.
The lower chamber is currently investigating the questionable insertions in the 2019 P3.757- trillion national budget by the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) headed by Secretary Benjamin E. Diokno.
Andaya has accused Diokno of another insertion by revising the implementing rules and regulations (IRR) of the Government Procurement Reform Act to allegedly transform the DBM into a super bidding body.
Andaya said the DBM, under Diokno, allegedly bidded out P198 billion worth of projects last year for 20 different government agencies that form part of the Duterte administration’s“Build, Build, Build” program.
He bared that the government will spend at least P37 billion to pay the consultants of big-ticket infrastructure projects through a small office in the DBM.
But before stepping down as chairman of the rules committee, Andaya has moved to refer the said investigation to the House Committee on Appropriations from the House Committee on Rules.
“Contrary to mongered fears, January 1 came to pass without a budget, but the sky did not fall, and neither did the government collapsed. We were confronted with two choices: Rubber-stamping the passage of a greatly flawed budget on time, or using more time to craft a better one purged of its in-born defects,” he said.
“If we choose the path of surrender and subservience, then such legislative haste would have surely led to budgetary waste. We cannot pass a budget marinated in flood-control funds, or drowning in DBM-inserted infrastructure projects, which the DPWH [Department of Public Works and Highways] remains clueless about,” Andaya said.
Earlier, Andaya revealed an alleged multibillion-peso flood-control scam in the national budget involving Diokno’s in laws.
“We cannot be casual or cavalier about the most important bill the Constitution assigns us to pass annually. In fact, in our mandate to represent our people, the duty to appropriate funds for and in their behalf ranks among the highest. This is so because, to quote a wit, worse than taxation without representation is taxation without appropriation,” Andaya said.
“And that is what appropriations is all about. The systematic rebate of revenues to those from whom these have been systematically collected. As I have always said, taxes are paid in cash but must be reimbursed in kind,” he added.
Welcome
Meanwhile, Camarines Sur Rep. Luis Raymund F. Villafuerte Jr. has welcomed the mini-leadership shakeup in the House of Representatives.
Villafuerte said Andaya’s resignation was a virtual admission that his position as majority leader has become untenable amid his ploy to torpedo the congressional approval of the 2019 General Appropriations Bill (GAB) by mounting a hatchet job on Diokno and the DBM.
“This leadership switch—in which Deputy Speaker Fredenil Castro took over as majority leader while Andaya assumed the chairmanship of the House committee on appropriations—was obviously meant to provide him with a face-saving or graceful exit as majority leader,” he said.
“The House majority coalition, Malacañang and the people will be at the losing end here because his new position as appropriations committee chairman would enable him to wreak havoc at the Bicam [Bicameral Conference Committee] that would eventually be formed to craft the consolidated GAB bill,” he added.
Villafuerte said the latest news reports quoted Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel F. Zubiri as saying that senators would try to pass their version of the GAB this week so the bicam could then be convened to hammer out the consolidated bill for submission to the President.
This leadership switch wouldn’t have been necessary, said Villafuerte, if Andaya hadn’t entered into his unholy alliance with the minority group in introducing a House resolution seeking Diokno’s ouster and then initiating the “bootleg inquiry” by the rules committee.
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