Reform

The rebellion, it seems, was over as soon as it began.

Luis Villafuerte tried to field an apparently nonchalant Pablo Garcia to contest the post of Speaker of the House of Representatives. The attempt failed to snowball as this faction might have expected. The vast majority of the elected congressmen of Kampi rushed to pledge their support for an unprecedented 5th term for Jose de Venecia.

Villafuerte and Garcia presented their challenge in the name of Kampi, the second largest representation at the House. But they could not muster more than a handful from within that party.

Kampi chairman Ronaldo Puno, through his brother congressman-elect Robbie Puno of Antipolo, called in the troops. They all showed up at de Venecia’s home late last week and signed a manifesto outlining a legislative program of reform — and, pledging “militant” support for de Venecia as speaker.

By Friday, last week, more than a majority of all the congressmen assembled at the de Venecia residence and joined the Speaker for a luncheon with the President at Malacañang Palace. The mutiny is quashed. The battle for Speaker of the House is over.

There will still be, of course, an election. The opposition at the House, led by Rep. Ronaldo Zamora, is trying their best to scrape together 15 votes for their own nominee for Speaker. That is a mere formality. Should they muster 15 votes, Zamora will become the Minority Floor Leader.

Villafuerte and Garcia are not the only casualties in this decisive turn of events. The other casualty is the opposition project of mounting a third impeachment attempt at the House.

Twice before, de Venecia mustered the numbers and successfully defended President Arroyo from the effort to dislodge her from power. That effort, we now know, is part of a conspiracy to force a transfer of power. It is an unseemly conspiracy driven by oligarchic money, marginalized political blocs and desperate radical groups.

By trivializing the impeachment process, making it a handy tool for partisan goals, this conspiracy could have brought the nation into another episode of intense political tumult. Such an outcome would have aborted the dynamic economic growth we now enjoy.

That conspiracy is still alive. According to the grapevine, the new scenario was to generate enough political energy from fanning the perception that the last elections was stolen.

But the opposition won the major share of Senate seats. They did not lose much in the local elections because they had fielded few candidates to begin with. That outcome, and the general public satisfaction with the conduct of our notoriously imperfect elections, takes the wind out of the devious scenario being nursed by the troublemakers.

We do not know yet who will sit as Senate President. That will be the outcome of discreet negotiations among the barons who sit in the chamber rather than among political parties dealing more openly in the public eye.

We do know that Jose de Venecia will sit as Speaker for an unprecedented 5th term when the new Congress opens on the third week of July. Because of that, we are certain that the House, at least, will continue as the source of innovative and forward-looking legislation.

De Venecia, we know, is much more than a master coalition-builder. He is also a committed visionary and extremely creative lawmaker.

From the law that enabled our banks to process remittances from our overseas workers, to the design of a legislative-executive development advisory council, to the build-operate-transfer law, de Venecia has opened many opportunities for our national economy to prosper.

He is a man of tireless imagination. Sometimes, many of his ideas are too far ahead of conventional thinking that people suspect him of exaggerating. Take his proposals for a debt-for-nature swap and his advocacy for a global inter-faith dialogue. Both have been adopted as advocacies of the United Nations.

His advocacies brought de Venecia to the diplomatic field. The past few years, he has relentlessly pushed the Asian Parliamentary Assembly (APA) closer to the idea of an Asian Parliament. A resolution to that effect was won last November in Tehran.

De Venecia has, the past few years, pushed his idea of a common Asian fund to ensure currency instability and prevent a repeat of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. That idea is now being actively entertained in many Asian capitals.

More cutting-edge legislation is promised by the “Declaration of Unity for Reform” — the document endorsed by 160 (possibly more) congressmen rallying behind de Venecia’s leadership.

Much of that declaration focuses on improving our economic policies to keep the growth momentum we have now achieved. It commits to speed up market-opening measures to catch Asia’s new wave of growth, put constitutional, political, electoral and institutional reforms in place as soon as possible, and raise our country’s competitiveness by further lowering the costs of doing business here.

The policy orientation indicated by the declaration assures us a continuation of the trajectory of reforms undertaken by the present leadership. De Venecia’s record as far as getting things done at the House makes the core principles of that document all the more reassuring.

At least, as far as the House is concerned, we have an indication of the drift of policy thinking. The question now is whether the Senate — a chamber likely to be embroiled in the competing political ambitions of several of its members — will be a functional instrument in consolidating the nation’s economic gains.