Philippine President Aquinos public Motion for Reconsideration - his spirited defense of the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) in his national address on the Supreme Courts decision declaring various aspects of the program unconstitutional - inevitably triggers public comment. I take the President at his word when he says that all of the DAP funds were spent quickly and urgently to serve what he deems were priority areas, and because he genuinely believes various sectors of the Filipino people were or could have been exposed to danger had he not ordered the mass transfer of savings from other departments to other agencies and projects. I also take the President at his word when he noted that the DAP helped improve the Philippine economy. For these reasons, I am certain the President would thus be open to a full-scale public audit of all DAP disbursements precisely to prove his point to the public on the efficiency of the DAP reallocations. The point, Mr. President, is that the DAP sets the most dangerous precedent for a country well-known for corruption. Future presidents may not be as honest as you have prided yourself on being these last four years. It is precisely the very same broad Executive arrogation of public funds, bypassing legislative controls, that created Marcoses and Arroyos, Mr. President. In any democracy - especially the United States - the Executive Branch has to find a way to work with Congress to fast-track priority projects and ensure swift disbursement of funds for needed contingencies. I find it very surprising that the present Aquino administration found it so difficult to do that when their party has the controlling majority in the Legislature. If your administration truly found it impossible to obtain the needed funds for these priority projects through Executive Branch coordination with the Legislature, the solution is NOT to have the Supreme Court do it for you. The solution, as with any democracy, is to have all the brilliant administrators work closely with the House and the Senate to get you the needed project and agency funds through the political process. Your administration has demonstrated that it can rally the House and the Senate votes swiftly enough for matters such as the impeachment of former Chief Justice Renato Corona - surely the same political leverage and Presidential gravitas can also be wielded to ensure Legislative cooperation with the Executive Branch on fast-tracking your development agenda? DAP cannot institutionalize your sense of discretion and reform priorities, Mr. President. No matter what its avowed benefits have been for the Filipino public, the only controls it ultimately relies on is your judgment and no one elses at the Legislature. DAP may not have been a case of misuse of public funds in the way PDAF was, but it remains a case of arrogation of exclusive control and discretion to transfer public funds for self-judged purposes. In 2011, Susan Rose-Ackerman at Yale Law School and I spoke of this phenomenon as hyper-presidentialism, in the fiscal sense. THAT is what the Philippine Supreme Court struck down, and it should not be assailed publicly for having done its job. Your lawyers well know that the battle should be pleaded in a Motion for Reconsideration at the proper forum before the Court - and not to publicly pressure the Supreme Court in a national address by depicting them as obstructionists in any way to the laudable reform agenda of your administration. It is not the Philippine Supreme Courts job to be your partner in public policy. That job belongs to the Legislature. Work with the Legislature to accomplish your reform agenda in the remaining years of the administration, and leave the Court to do its job when it sees that the lines of accountability in the Constitution have been breached. This is not a personal attack by the Court and it ought not degenerate into a personal attack on the Court, this is simply how our constitutional democracy works. Just as you wish to act swiftly and expeditiously for the interests of the Filipino people, they are mandated to safeguard the use of public funds drawn from the Filipino people.
Posted on: Tue, 15 Jul 2014 15:51:38 +0000
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