Duterte: End of the house crisis or else

President Duterte threatened Thursday night to intervene to prevent the delay of the proposed P4.5 trillion budget for 2021 if members of the House of Representatives failed to resolve the crisis caused by President Alan Peter Cayetano’s delay in the transfer. leadership to Marinduque. Rep. Lord Allan Velasco under a shared term agreement.

To avoid a leadership vote, Cayetano ended plenary debates on the budget on Tuesday and suspended the session long before the Oct. 17 date for the House to leave the city. He set the resumption of the session for November 16, which, according to the senators, would lose them a month of time to deliberate on the budget.

The delay, the senators said, would undoubtedly lead to a re-enactment of the budget for 2021.

Malacañang said Wednesday that President Duterte did not want a reworked budget because his proposed budget for 2021 contained new spending for programs that would allow the country to recover from the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

Cryptic Warning

In a 15-minute televised address to the nation Thursday night, Duterte issued a cryptic warning, but did not say what exactly he would do to end the House leadership dispute.

“I want to say it in a direct statement: or you solve the [leadership impasse there] and approve the budget, legally and constitutionally, [or]If you don’t, I’ll do it for you, ”Duterte said.

“I am not threatening you. I do not have the ambition to stay long in this position, which brings so many problems. I mean, if you don’t solve the problem, I’ll solve it for you, ”he added. Duterte said he would not give a deadline for the House to resolve the leadership dispute between Cayetano and Velasco.

“We always forget that there is something higher to delay or maneuver in Congress, because everyone wants to be a Spokesperson,” he said.

“I want you to fix this. If and when I see that there will be a delay, and it will result in the derailment of government service, I, I said, will solve the problem for you. I hope you understand. I will not apologize for saying this, ”he said.

Duterte issued the warning after meeting with selected cabinet and security officials in Malacañang.

The Palace has yet to clarify what exactly the president meant at press time.

Special session

Following Duterte’s speech, Senate President Vicente Sotto III said that he hoped that the people the president was addressing would hear his call.

On Tuesday, Sotto suggested that the president call Congress to a special session to pass the budget on time.

Earlier Thursday, presidential spokesman Harry Roque said calling a special session was a possibility to avoid a re-enactment of the budget.

“Congress will rise for Christmas on December 14. If it is really necessary, a special session can be called after the 14th. There are no prejudices there, “said Roque.

Senator Panfilo Lacson said that to avoid delays, the House must resume the session before November to approve the budget in third reading and transmit it to the Senate.

That way, Lacson said, the Senate could begin plenary deliberations on the budget when sessions resume on Nov. 16.

Lacson said he informed Cayetano that senators, especially the finance committee vice chairs, would need a week to study the House version and present their reports to the committee chair, and then the committee would need another week to consolidate the reports.

Sotto said Cayetano had promised to present to the Senate “before November 5” advance copies of the House budget books, or the general appropriations bill. “I said that will help us, especially our CFO,” Sotto said, referring to Sen. Sonny Angara, head of the finance committee.

“We will do everything we can to work on time, as the Senate always does,” he said. Sotto also said that he had accepted Cayetano’s apology for saying earlier that if the budget was delayed, it would be the fault of the Senate.

Resumption of the session

Makabayan’s party-list coalition in the House also urged a resumption of the session to continue budget deliberations, including discussions on allocations for 14 government agencies.

“We call on the House leadership to immediately resume the suspended plenary session, reconsider the approval at second reading and continue public deliberations on the general appropriations bill,” the bloc said in a statement.

Velasco also asked that the session be resumed to approve the budget.

In a statement, he asked Cayetano to “put aside political differences,” since the budget issue “is much bigger than the fight for the speaker’s position.”

“Blackmailing the executive department into giving in to one’s personal ambition or holding the budget hostage to achieve one’s political whim is a disservice to the Filipino people,” Velasco said.

‘Small committee’

But Cayetano rejected calls to resume the session, saying that resubmitting the budget to plenary deliberations would only expose it to “political saboteurs.”

“If we continue with the budget hearing on the floor, now it will be politicized, since there are saboteurs, there are people who have personal intentions, and members of Congress and departments can no longer speak face to face,” said Cayetano.

“This is not a shortcut, it is a better way,” he said.

It was Cayetano himself who took the floor on Tuesday and proposed ending the debates on the budget bill and its approval in second reading, without going through the amendment period.

In lieu of the amendment period, he proposed that House members propose “committee and individual amendments” to a “small committee” made up of 13 staunch allies.

“The small committee will coordinate closely with the members of the cabinet and I consulted many people in the executive as well as the legislative-executive, that is, the cabinet, because that is the budget of their departments,” he said.

Cayetano said the House could not simply resume the session because the resumption was already scheduled for November 16.

“[W]We can’t just go into the session room, even if 300 of us are present, and say we resume the session because we can resume [only] on November 16, ”he said. In addition, Cayetano said, reconvene the Chamber to continue working on the budget does not mean a better result.

“We will have a better quality budget if we allow the small committee to do its job,” he said.

Cayetano said that the “intrigues” sown by the Velasco camp had led to the withholding of funds for projects proposed by lawmakers in the 2020 budget.

“I do not want that to happen again this year because if the funds are retained again, those who suffer are not the legislator, or the mayor, or the governor, but the people because that fund is for them,” he said.

Under a shared term agreement negotiated by President Duterte in July last year, Cayetano would serve as president for the first 15 months of the 18th Congress and Velasco would assume office for the last 21 months of the term.

Duterte met with the two men in Malacañang on September 25 and told them that he hoped they would honor their agreement.

House drama

On September 30, however, Cayetano interrupted budget deliberations and offered to resign. His allies called for a vote to reject his resignation with a 184-1 vote, but Velasco’s side said the Marinduque congressman was gaining more support and had a following of at least 160 as of October 4. Two days later, sensing the presence of Velasco The camp was preparing for a leadership vote, Cayetano finished work on the budget and suspended the session. Before the president went on television with his threat Thursday, the Velasco camp said it would proceed with a leadership vote on Oct. 14.

The representative of Mindoro Oriental Salvador Leachon, a follower of Velasco, said that the presumed president already had the support of 161 members of the 300-member Chamber.

He said the Velasco camp was “carefully planning” its next moves and was not prevented from convening the Chamber despite Cayetano’s suspension of the session. —REPORTS FROM JULIE M. AURELIO, LEILA B. SALAVERRIA AND MELVIN GASCON

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