LAWMAKERS on Tuesday asked President Duterte to convene the Legislative-Executive Development Advisory Council (Ledac) to update the Common Legislative Agenda (CLA).
Marinduque Rep. Lord Allan Velasco said there must be an agreement among the Executive, the Senate, and the House of Representatives on which bills in the CLA will be prioritized so these can be enacted into laws at the soonest possible time.
“I suggest that the [Ledac], which is chaired by the President himself, be convened at the earliest possible time so that both the Executive and the Legislative branches of government can arrive at a Common Legislative Agenda, similar to what we did during the 17th Congress,” he said.
“As expected, the President was astute and sharp in reporting to his constituents the current state of the nation. Sharing his clear vision for the remaining half of his term, President Duterte laid down his legislative agenda which centered on several measures aimed at fighting corruption, improving the peace and order, boosting the economy, and uplifting the lives of the Filipino people,” he added.
Velasco said he already filed three of the
priority measures of the
President, namely, postponing the barangay elections from May 2020 to October
2022, institutionalizing the ROTC and rightsizing government bureaucracy.
Earlier, Speaker Alan Peter Cayetano said House members will hold a regular monthly meeting with their counterparts in the Senate and Executive Department to ensure faster approval of the legislative agenda of the 18th Congress.
At least 2,500 bills and resolutions are now pending on first reading at the plenary. Once a measure has been introduced and given a number, it is read and referred to an appropriate committee.
Swift action
Deputy Speaker
Luis Raymund Villafuerte of Camarines Sur said the House of Representatives
should now buckle down and work on the priority initiatives that the President
has spelled out to buttress his legacy of “improving the life of
every Filipino.”
Villafuerte said that in support of the President’s must-do list in the Sona, the House should consider the restoration of the death penalty; the creation of the Department for overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), Department of Water Resources and the Department of Disaster Resilience; postponement and synchronization of next year’s Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) polls with the 2022 national elections; passage of the Magna Carta for barangays; and a new fire protection code.
He said the House should also work fast to craft a new Land Use Act; a salary standardization law; a much better version of the earlier vetoed bill on the use of the P100-billion coconut-levy fund; and passing the remaining packages of the comprehensive tax reform program (CTRP), particularly the Tax Reform for Attracting Better and High-Quality Opportunities (Trabaho) bill primarily for the benefit of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and the higher excise taxes on tobacco and alcohol products.
Double time
House Majority Leader Martin Romualdez said, “We will work double-time to act on the President’s priority bills, especially those aimed at improving the lives of our people.”
He assured the economic managers that “Congress will align its legislative agenda with President Duterte’s priority economic bills, which aims to cut poverty almost by half in 2022.”
Government agencies
Moreover, Villafuerte said the concerned government agencies should also do their part by attending to Duterte’s other proposals, such as the faster rollout of infrastructure projects under “Build, Build, Build;” the elimination of corruption in agencies like the Bureau of Customs (BOC) and the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth); the delivery of better frontline services by the Social Security System (SSS), Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), Land Registration Authority (LRA), Land Transportation Office (LTO) and the Home Development Mutual Fund (HDMF or Pag-IBIG Fund); the channeling of more credit to farmers by the Land Bank of the Philippines (LandBank); and the full implementation of the rice tariffication law.