EVEN some members of the Consultative Committee (Con-com) believe that their proposed federal Charter will be staying in the back burner at least until the end of the 2019 midterm elections.
This, as the Senate and the House of Representatives are conducting budget deliberations and reelectionist lawmakers are preparing for their campaign for the May 30, 2019, midterm elections.
Con-com member Arthur N. Aguilar told the BusinessMirror that he doesn’t see their draft federal Charter being talked about anymore in Congress until the new Senate and House takes shape after the elections.
“Maybe if the new Senate is so inclined and the House is also so inclined, and the President still has his advocacy on federalism, maybe this time next year, it would be revived. But between now and then, I don’t see anything,” Aguilar said.
He also said that based on the public pronouncements of the senators, he is almost sure that the Senate won’t do anything to push their federalism proposal.
Senators from both sides have also ruled out the possibility of front-loading the passage of an enabling law to pave the way for early ratification of Charter change crafted by the Con-com.
Aside from this, senators are lukewarm to the federalism shift as they raised concerns on the impact of the change in the form of government, including the proposal bringing in additional fiscal costs and taxes, among others.
For Con-com member and former Supreme Court Associate Justice Eduardo B. Nachura, the proposed federal Charter will be “seriously considered” by Congress after the 2019 elections.
“There is simply no time to deliberate on the proposed amendments while the members of Congress are busy as candidates in the coming election,” Nachura told the BusinessMirror in a message.
Another Con-com member and political analyst Edmund S. Tayao said he still sees the Senate as a stumbling block in the administration’s push for federalism, noting that they don’t see any problem with the House.
“In the case of the Senate…they did not even bother looking at the draft, and especially with the Constitutional Amendments [Committee] in the Senate, it was quite obvious that the resources of the Senate were used only to pillory the draft itself, including the members of the Consultative Committee that worked for the draft. So in other words, it’s quite obvious that the Senate did not even bother reading the proposal because, for obvious reasons, the proposal includes the Senate being an entirely different body, being elected regionally instead of being elected in the same way that it is being elected now,” Tayao told the BusinessMirror.
Con-com’s draft has the senators elected per region to ensure that each region will be equally represented in the Senate.
Under the draft federal Charter, Con-com is proposing to have 18 federated regions, including the Negros Island region.
In the meantime, the lone woman Con-com member and lawyer Susan Ubalde-Ordinario said the members are doubling their efforts to intensify the public information campaign on federalism.
“[We are] reaching out to as many [people] and as [many] far-flung communities as we can,” Ubalde-Ordinario said in a message sent to the BusinessMirror.
The Duterte administration has been pushing for a federal form of government in a bid to spur economic growth across all regions, not just in Metro Manila. It also aims to decentralize the powers of the national government under the unitary form of government.