Breaktime: By popular disband

The Supreme Court decision against the pork barrel system in Congress—and it was “pork barrel” by any name, whether PDAF or CDF—obviously made the ordinary taxpaying citizens of this country really happy.

OK, those in favor of our keeping the pork barrel system were also citizens, but they were not your ordinary taxpayers, strictly speaking, because they were part of the ruling class as members of Congress or the Aquino (Part II) administration.

And who else, aside from those in power, would want to defend the PDAF at this time?

In a sense, you could say that the Supreme Court decision was a popular one, demanded by the general taxpaying public, or at least those who had the means to voice out their opinion. The times called for it.

Despite the tumult in media over the destruction wrought by Supertyphoon “Yolanda,” the country just could not set aside the P10-billion scandal over the PDAF, officially known as the priority development assistance fund, allegedly involving Ma’am Jenny, or Janet Lim-Napoles, also featuring lawmakers with codenames like Tanda, Sexy and Pogi.

Technically, the PDAF was simply one way for our dear lawmakers to earmark our tax money without going through the normal tedious budgetary routes—some sort of a shortcut that makes it open to abuses, particularly with this relatively recent invention called “soft” projects, to which quick-release money supposedly went, in the name of helping the poor through scholarships and medical assistance.

By the way, those in favor of the PDAF—i.e., both the legislative and executive branches—mildly argued that the lawmakers needed funding from the PDAF to help students and indigents in their own districts.

Precisely, the public viewed the PDAF as just another tool for our beloved congressmen and senators to perpetuate this thing called patronage politics.

They might not be directly buying votes through the use of PDAF. It was just that nobody should be stupid enough to believe that our politicos chose to give PDAF subsidies to the allies of their known political enemies.

Besides, based on talk that has been going around in the business community for the past 20 years or so, the PDAF, or even the CDF, would be put to better use if the money were injected directly into the school system, such as by creating more scholarship programs in state universities.

Anyway, you could label the Supreme Court any bad term you like, but it would be tricky to say the justices were insensitive to public opinion on the PDAF scandal.

For one, the voting in the Supreme Court was unanimous against the PDAF—well, except for one justice who abstained, offering a really deep philosophical reason that his offspring was a lawmaker.

The popularity of its decision against the pork barrel system—i.e., the infamy of the PDAF—apparently did not exist some 20 years ago, when ordinary taxpayers kneeled before the Supreme Court, asking it to disband the same system.

In 1994, as this newspaper reported, our government called the pork barrel system CDF, or countrywide development fund. The Supreme Court at that time had nothing but praises for it.

Those were the times when our dear Kuya Eddie was still the most powerful man in the land as President Fidel V. Ramos, and the next most powerful man was his provincemate from Pangasinan, former House Speaker Jose de Venecia.

Anyway, the Supreme Court stated then that the petitioners needed to prove the abuses committed by our dear lawmakers in their use of CDF. And who could ever even hope to prove it, particularly without any help from the police or the NBI, right?

More importantly, however, it also said then that the system was, well, “constitutional,” because it kept the line that separated legislative and executive authorities over how the government would spend our tax money.

But this time around, the Supreme Court said that, all along, from the time it was still called CDF, the system was unconstitutional, although nothing really changed in the pork barrel system that made the Supreme Court reverse itself.

The argument against the system remained, then as now, basically the same line of thought: It supposedly ran against the so-called principle of separation of powers between the legislature and the executive branches, period.

Today the Supreme Court nevertheless had to deal with the P10-billion PDAF scandal, which already invited the ire of the public, as evident in postings on the Internet, not to mention the actual monstrous protest rallies against the system.

In its reports, in fact, one foreign news agency even called the scandal as “the biggest crisis” of Aquino (Part II) administration, because the Palace—possibly as the personal position of our dear leader Benigno Simeon (aka BS)—supported the PDAF.

In the Supreme Court case, the Aquino (Part II) administration argued in favor of the PDAF, including of course the President’s Social Fund, with its actual amount unknown year-in and year-out, sourced mainly from winnings of the state casino Pagcor.

Moreover, some reports already called the Supreme Court decision against the system as a big blow to the Aquino (Part II) administration, possibly in terms of the public image of our dear leader BS regarding his line about the straight and narrow path.

Now the DAP (development acceleration program) should be another story altogether, and the Supreme Court would still have to rule on its legality, with the oral arguments presented before the court only a couple of days ago.

Expectedly, the DAP case would deal mainly with legalities, whether or not our leader BS actually had the power to move around funds among government outfits, whether or not the DAP was actually a “special fund” and not just an “economic program.”

The Aquino (Part II) administration of course always maintained that the DAP was simply an economic pump-priming program. Not many could deny, not even those against the DAP, that the program was actually a way for the administration to stimulate government spending, thus making up for the slow implementation of projects that somehow slowed down economic growth two years ago.

The question now is this: Does the economy still need the stimulus now? You bet—what with the needs of the ordinary taxpaying public to rebuild their lives after the supertyphoon and earthquake in the Visayas.

That is also the popular choice.

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