The 16th Congress of the Philippines closed last Wednesday night with a whimper, its members chased away by about a hundred senior citizens who were simply asking them to make good on their word. These are the supposed representatives of the people, who cannot even tell a bunch of old people to their faces that they could not dare reverse a presidential veto on pension increases that they themselves passed.
What a farce. What a collection of cowardly traitors to the people they are supposed to serve.
What’s ironic is that the Lower House actually mustered a quorum of 231 members last Wednesday, more than enough to do whatever the chamber liked. This included overriding President Noynoy Aquino’s veto of the P2,000 monthly increase in the pensions of members of the Social Security System, which passed in both the House and the Senate before it was summarily executed in Malacañang.
It’s enough to make a grown man cry. And that’s exactly what Bayan Muna Rep. Neri Colmenares, the original author of the pension increase bill, did— although he claims that something just got in his eye.
It was Colmenares who wanted to force a vote on the House floor on the override. If the House really didn’t want to offend Aquino by reversing his veto, Colmenares reasoned, at least they should say so in a vote.
But even after the chamber determined the presence of a quorum by 5 p.m., allowing them to vote on anything they wanted, nothing happened on the floor. And when Colmenares stood his ground that the chamber should first vote on the proposed override, despite pleas for him for the body to first pass another of Malacañang’s pet legislative measures, that ensured that nothing was going to happen at all.
See, the quorum was apparently mustered in a bid to approve the Aquino-backed draft Public-Private Partnership law, which Congress had already passed on third and final reading Monday night. But on Tuesday, after Colmenares pointed out that Monday’s passage of the proposed PPP law had been constitutionally flawed, the House leadership had no choice but to withdraw the passed measure and attempt to pass it again, this time with a bigger quorum.
The usual henchmen of Speaker Feliciano Belmonte pleaded with Colmenares to allow a vote on the PPP law first before tacking the override, but the lawmaker—and obviously the assembled senior citizens in the gallery —would not allow it. So the House decided to sacrifice the passage of the PPP measure so that they would not have to face the stony silence of the gathered old people.
What happened, according to those in the know, was that the House leadership was afraid that if it called for a vote on the SSS pension override, the reversal would win. Through their usual method of communication of text messaging—also inordinately favored by their real boss, Aquino—House leaders were told by the congressmen present that they could not vote against the override because their constituents—old people, mainly, like those who had descended on the Batasan that day—had been importuning them to just vote like they did when they passed the pension increase in the first place.
And our craven legislators could not allow that. So no roll call was even called; so the House went into recess, to resume sessions again after the elections beginning May 23, when another President will already have been chosen.
What wusses. What unforgivably callous, lily-livered behavior from those bloviating blowhards we call congressmen.
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Is there still hope that Congress will override Aquino’s heartless veto of the SSS pension increase, without waiting for the next Congress to do the job? Colmenares, no longer teary-eyed, thinks there is.
He intends to once again file his resolution calling for a vote on the override when Congress reopens for its last sessions beginning on May 23. “Maybe then, when Congress is no longer afraid of the President and no longer needs anything anymore from him, they can do the right thing,” Colmenares told me.
Of course, Neri’s action could once again suffer the cruel fate that it met this week. But that is nothing to be ashamed of, as far as he’s concerned.
His colleagues, on the other hand, have everything to be ashamed about. And they will go down in history as probably the most pusillanimous bunch of legislators ever to tread the halls of Congress—halls that have seen all manner of lily-livered, money-grubbing people’s representatives who are almost always on the lookout for a quick buck from Malacañang, in aid of staying in office or of installing their equally greedy relatives there.
If you have tears like Neri, you can shed them now. And seek revenge through the ballot in May.