SUPREME Court Chief Justice Miguel S. Demapan says Gov. Juan N. Babauta may be “usurping” the authority of the Legislature with the administration’s recent move to reduce budget allocations without permission from lawmakers.
In a two-page April 24 letter to the governor, Demapan said that while he agreed with Attorney General Robert T. Torres’s legal opinion that “it is mandatory that budget reductions be proportionately applied,” the executive branch could not push through with the cuts as this authority belongs to the legislative branch.
But acting Gov. Diego T. Benavente, in an interview on Friday, said the administration had complied with all the requirements under the law before it went ahead with the budget cuts that also affected the judiciary.
The administration earlier exempted the Public School System from the budget reduction, but Torres issued an opinion that the cut should be proportionate and PSS should not be “spared.”
The chief justice argued that the law also “requires (the governor) to mandate the Legislature to proportionately reduce the budget.”
Demapan told Babauta: “You may not reduce the budget yourself without transmitting (a) special message to the Legislature which must subsequently implement the proportionate reduction. You would usurp the functioning of the Legislature were you attempt to reduce the budget without going through the Legislature. The special message is not self-implementing legislation. It is rather a mandate to the Legislature that the Legislature implement legislation.”
“Of course, we do need to clarify if there is a misunderstanding,” Benavente said. “But I had been with the Legislature (for so many years), and speaker of the House of Representatives (for six years) and I had never heard anyone say that the reduction implementation should be done by the Legislature. Definitely, in the budget process, the Legislature has a responsibility and I think that’s maybe the reason why the chief justice is implying that the Legislature should do this,” he said.
The lt. governor said the administration had already notified the Legislature on the reduction and thus had complied with what the law mandated.
“The Constitution requires balanced spending that makes it illegal for deficit spending. And therefore as required by the Constitution, the governor after being notified through certification by the finance secretary that there is a reduction in the projection (of revenue), must act by first informing the Legislature through notification. And we have done that already,” Benavente said.
He said the administration will reply to the chief justice’s concern. But he said that they “disagree” with Demapan’s position.
On the PSS’s exemption, Benavente found it “interesting” that if they were going to follow Torres’s opinion and not exempt PSS from the cut, then “we would also not have the authority to relieve the Legislature of the cut that we have had in the past.”
Benavente said when the 1998 $249 million estimate revenue was reduced to $206 million, a 13.4 percent budget cut was implemented by the Tenorio administration “across the board,” but the Legislature was exempted.
