The sense of entitlement is strong with this one. And I don’t know how threatened House Majority Leader Rodolfo Fariñas thinks he and his fellow members of Congress feel—he shouldn’t get away with this shameless bid to make taxpayers pay for his and every other lawmaker’s personal security by creating a dedicated police force just for them.
Fariñas, whom wags at the Lower House have taken to calling the “real speaker” because he seems to be in the forefront of every action in his chamber, eclipsing even Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez, has filed a bill calling for the establishment of what he calls the Philippine Legislative Police. The purpose of this new, entirely distinct law enforcement agency is to protect members of Congress, their spouses and their kin, up to the second degree of consanguinity “upon determination and validation that their lives are under threat,” the properties of the Congress and maintaining peace and order in its premises.
Let’s do a little arithmetic to find out how much Fariñas’ “private army” is going to cost.
There are more than 300 members of Congress in both Houses. The new police force that will secure them, their relatives, their property and their premises will have to be several times that number, at least. But we’ll assume that three cops will be given to one lawmaker—a conservative figure, since the number of people needing protection will not include the legislators’ spouses, children, mistresses and all others that the new police force will be assigned to guard.
The Philippine National Police, on the other hand, has 170,000 or so members and was given a budget of P88.513 billion in 2016. That means the average cost to the public of one policeman is P529,664.70 annually, all in, as the car dealers say.
Now, let’s assume that 1,000 new policemen are hired for Fariñas’ law enforcement agency. That comes up to P529.664 million for the new PLP—in just a year.
That figure may not sound too big in the context of the P3.7 trillion national budget for 2018 that the entire government wants Congress to approve this week. But it’s big enough, for such a small police force, given that the current lawmaker-to-citizen ratio is one cop for every 572 people, according to official PNP data.
If you have three lawmen for every lawmaker, that would be a ratio of 3:1, making Congress a veritable police state, something which also makes the 1:572 ratio for the rest of us sound like a recipe for complete and utter lawlessness. (Of course, anti-Duterte politicians have already long concluded that this is the prevailing situation, but that’s not the story here.)
Over the next five years, in fact, the PNP announced earlier this year that it wants to hire 10,000 new policemen to bring the cop-to-citizen ratio to a better 1:500 and bring down the national crime rate significantly. But assigning a tenth of these new cops to Fariñas’ Army is not part of the PNP’s plans, of course.
That’s entirely on Fariñas, naturally. After all, this is the House leader who asked traffic authorities earlier this month that congressmen and their drivers should not be arrested for minor traffic infractions so as not to impede the progress on the road of lawmakers rushing to get to the Batasan before the 4 p.m. roll call during session days.
Perhaps, in lieu of paying taxes to the government through the Bureau of Internal Revenue, we should just all directly remit the money to Congress. After all, Congress holds the purse strings, as they say, because they get to approve the national budget.
I’m sure Farinas will only be too happy if he and his fellow lawmakers get to collect all our taxes and disburse the money to the entire government, as Congress sees fit. Then maybe our lawmakers will have more than enough money to stay in power forever and to live in the manner that they have become accustomed to—and which they believe they so richly deserve.
Finally, a friend has proposed that, in order to give Farinas what he wants right away, 1,000 of the worst members of the now-notorious Caloocan City police force be immediately assigned to our members of Congress as the new members of the PLP. In this way, the Duterte government will be able to rid that tainted police force of alleged bloodthirsty scalawags and make bloodsucking lawmakers happy at the same time.
If the Caloocan cops live up to their reputation and start killing the people that they’re supposed to protect, I’m sure no one will really mind.
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The wife of Commission on Elections Chairman Andres Bautista, newly “freed” from impeachment charges by the House of Representatives, has filed criminal complaints against the Divina Law firm, which allegedly secured a “sweetheart” contract for legal services with Comelec’s automation provider Smartmatic with Bautista’s backing.
This is supposed to be Patricia “Tish” Bautista’s way of getting around the dismissal of the impeachment complaint against her husband and the start of a new effort to get him to pay for his sins. Hell hath no fury, indeed.
