Common Sense is the Best Aid for Legislation...not the limelight-flooded hearings
Posted on Monday, 10 October 2016
COMMON SENSE IS THE BEST AID FOR
LEGISLATION
…NOT THE LIMELIGHT-FLOODED HEARINGS
By Apolinario Villalobos
No amount of cover up can deny the ultimate
objective of the legislators in conducting “hearing in aid of legislation”. The
two Houses keep on denying that they are courts of justice, yet the way they
conduct hearings run contrary to their allegation. Hearings drag unnecessarily
and are kept on being conducted despite the accumulation of inputs enough to
frame a law or laws. It seems that dragging is intentional as the longer the
hearings are conducted, the longer they get covered by media…and that’s for
free, yet!
On the other hand, the situations that they
are investigating do not need costly hearings at all. All they need is conduct
sensible and honest-to-goodness researches, for which task, they are supposed
to have hired Consultants and Researchers. Expenses for these are supposed to
be part of their operating budget that runs into millions of pesos!
In the case of drug trade inside the
Bilibid, for instance, how can these lawmakers not know that such activity is
not only proliferating, but has even taken root, too deep, to be budged? How
can they not know that something is wrong with practically the whole system of
the penitentiary which is under the DOJ, as obviously, too, despite its having
an Operating Manual? How can they not give attention to the exposes made since
the time of Marcos on the anomalies that began as petty ones? How can they not
know that the Bilibid has become bigger than an urban barangay or even two
combined, complete with luxurious facilities?
On the extrajudicial killings….how can the
legislators not know that they are offshoots of double-timing transactions
among drug suppliers and their cohorts? How can they not know about drugs being
recycled by the police and has become a lucrative business among these rogues
in uniform, known as, “police ninjas”? How can they not know that there are
vigilantes who take the law into their hands after suffering from
disappointments on how cases of their victimized loved ones are shoddily
handled by corrupt judges, so called, “rogues in robe”? How can they not know
that even remote barangays have been infiltrated by the drug menace, and that
hideous crimes, such as rape with murder, kidnapping, hostage-taking, and many
others related to it are being committed almost daily?
Law makers can better use their tax-paid
time in reviewing old laws that need to be updated rather than come up with
many more that are just shelved due to lack of funds needed for their
implementation. But then, millions are filched by corrupt officials from the
government coffer!
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