Battleground

The budget is the main battleground. The nation’s fate will be defined here.

It is important that our citizens not lose focus on what is truly important. We are being robbed in broad daylight. The looters must not be allowed to win – again.

Thirty-five of the most reputable business associations have dared to take a stand. The version of the budget passed by the House of Representatives must not be allowed to stand. A proper budget is where the line should be drawn.

Our most irresponsible politicians are trying hard to distract us with flashy sideshows.

Some try to convince us the most important thing for the country is to impeach the Vice President. This is nothing but cynical power play. It is the House prosecution panel that needs to be held accountable for all the congressional insertions the past few years that have been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Others are cynically trying to win votes for themselves by indulging in jingoism against China. Ironically, the country chairs the ASEAN this year. We dismay the other members of the regional association by violating ASEAN centrality and pushing our own country to a war with the regional superpower. We are removing the country’s future from the mainstream of regional commerce.

Xi Jinping will not be attending the ASEAN summit meeting to be held in Manila in a few days. That is the least he could do to show deference to the other ASEAN capitals scandalized by the outlandish jingoism of Filipino politicians.

Still others are trying to make a spectacle out of the lackluster effort to arrest Sen. Bato dela Rosa. To date, however, no one has shown a valid warrant of arrest against the senator.

It is strange that no Cabinet-level official has publicly complained about the congressmen hijacking funding for the mainline agencies and redirecting the money to congressional pet projects. It is as if a gag order has been imposed on them to refrain from stoking the budget controversy.

It is stranger still that President Marcos Jr. has maintained silence while outrage over the budget spreads. His own son figures prominently in the controversy, given the huge sums assigned to his home province. The son has not said a thing about the obviously mangled budget.

Marcos Jr. claims he is respecting Congress’ power of the purse by keeping his distance from the emerging scandal. But this is not the first budget controversy in his watch. All national budgets passed under his watch have been found defective.

The President has tasked his Solicitor General to appeal the recent Supreme Court ruling about the unconstitutionality of previous budget enactments. Given the near unanimous ruling of the Court, however, it is unlikely that the ruling handed down will be diluted.

This is significant. All the national budgets in question were signed into law by Marcos Jr. On several instances, he claimed to have read the budget documents – particularly the severely mangled 2025 budget – cover-to-cover. As soon as he steps down from office, he could be held accountable for the enactment of flawed budgets that opened the floodgates to massive looting of taxpayer money.

There is much at stake in a proper and thorough review of the proposed 2027 national budget. For several years consecutively, funds were removed from foreign-assisted projects. This produced years of delay as well as government paying billions in commitment fees.

In order to restore government’s counterpart funding for these strategic projects, money will have to be removed from 7,000 or so congressional pet projects. Hundreds of billions in hard, soft and shadow pork will have to be stripped to avert a complete fiscal crisis from happening.

Massive work will have to be put in to reconstitute a grossly mangled budget proposal. We are not sure if Sen. JV Ejercito will be up to the task. He will certainly be under immense political pressure – including from an administration that needs large volumes of patronage money to buy enough support to stay afloat.

Ejercito has a very hot potato on his hands. He may not get enough support from his majority colleagues in the chamber because most of them are trying to keep their heads low. He may not have much of a record for economic statesmanship, but the challenge has been thrust to him.

He has an opportunity for greatness – along with the peril that he flubs the assignment and discovers a congressional lynching mob at his door.

I cannot imagine how the undermanned Senate could successfully reconstitute the budget while keeping the impeachment show going. While that chamber tries to manage the budget controversy, the presidency will still be in do-nothing mode. If the Senate succeeds in recasting the mangled budget document, it might fail trying to reconcile the pork-hungry House version.

A surprisingly adept little army of civil society volunteers combed through the budget accounts and unearthed all the questionable items in it. The business community has thrown its support behind the work of what Boo Chanco so brilliantly described as the “Angry Nerds.” This little volunteer army could yet unsettle the pork barrel state that bedeviled our nation’s progress for too long.

There is a real peril that the nation will be forced to reenact the budget. If that happens, the consensus is that this will further devastate our economy.