Lawmaking at its lowest and slowest
Compared with their forerunners, it appears that members of the 13th Congress are not as prolific in terms of legislative output. To date, only a total of 6,265 bills have been filed by the current batch of legislators since 26 July of last year and only five bills of national significance (Fixing the Date of ARMM Elections, Sin Taxes Act, Lateral Attrition Act, the General Appropriations Act, and the Amended VAT law) have been passed. With roughly a month to go before it adjourns on 10 June and operating on a truncated four-day work-week, Congress has barely passed the halfway-mark of what past Congresses have achieved in terms of legislation.
Since the 9th Congress, lawmakers have filed an average of 9,000 bills during the first session. The present legislators could only reach 68% of that figure and roughly 58% of the 11,126 bills filed from 27 July 1992 to 30 June 1993. A breakdown of figures, however, will show that the Senate has been increasing the number of bills it has filed compared to the House of Representatives. From the 9th to the 12th Congress, the Senate managed to increase its legislative output by as much as 20% during the past three first sessions and is almost near the numbers it posted during the same period in the last Congress. Meanwhile, the House has been continually decreasing its output by an average of 19% since 1992. Overall, the number of bills filed by Congress during the first session has been falling by 13% every year.
The House has approved 13 measures that are presently pending in the Senate compared to the 95 bills it endorsed to the Senate in the 12th Congress. Moreover, while one bill became a law for every 585 bills filed in Congress in the past, that ratio has deteriorated to one measure being successfully enacted out of every 1,566 bills filed.
These figures show that taxpayers have been getting increasingly poorer performance from their elected legislators, even as the latter get to operate on the full amount allocated to them from the national coffers.
The crafting of new laws goes through a bottleneck when one chamber approves a measure on third reading and has to wait for the other chamber’s version of the third-reading bill. With the exception of tax laws and corporate franchises (which have to be initiated by the House before the Senate can start its own process of filing a bill for eventual conciliation), all laws can originate from either chamber and their passage hinges mainly on their prioritization by either the Senate or the House. What used to be a process that was always costly but had run smoothly has now become an expensive and time-consuming procedure that fails to produce crucial pieces of legislation when they are most needed.
The process can be lengthy. For instance, RA 9334 (the Sin Tax) was a consolidation of 12 House bills and two Senate bills and took more than five months before it could be enacted on 12 December 2004. The first version – HB 194, was filed on 1 July 2004. The 2005 General Appropriations Act (RA 9336) was filed in the House on 25 October 2004 and became a law after more than four months on 15 March 2005 (budget hearings for RA 9336 were initiated on 22 September 2004 by the House Committee on Appropriations). The latest measure, the amendment to the VAT law was first introduced in Congress through HB 1468 filed on 15 July 2004. It was then consolidated with other House and Senate measures and will only be signed into law by the President this month – after almost a year in the legislative pipeline.
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