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Blanks

President BBM claims to have pored through the over 4,000-page 2025 GAA and failed to find “those damned blank items.”

This is such a waste of precious presidential time. All the while, he was reading the wrong document. The blanks are not in the GAA. They are in the signed final report of the bicameral conference committee. That report is the basis for the enrolled bill which, when signed, becomes the GAA.

The blank items in the bicam report is the locus of controversy. After so much public debate, we still do not know who filled in the blanks. The debate has evolved into a full-blown constitutionality question before the Supreme Court.

All our legislators have to do is to produce the questioned documents and detail how the process proceeded after a blanks-ridden committee report was signed. They have not done that.

After weeks of scampering from the media, Rep. Stella Quimbo thinks she has found a fitting explanation for the blanks that could no longer be denied – except if you are President of the Republic. Quimbo replaced Zaldy Co as chair of the House Appropriations Committee after the latter was unceremoniously ousted as the debate over the 2025 budget bloomed.

Quimbo now tells us the blanks were filled in by the technical working group of the bicam since this was merely a “calculator activity.” That was as limp an explanation as there ever could be. It reeks of the cavalier attitude some of our legislators hold for the grave mandate they were given.

Critics of the manner are now demanding the names of the technical working group who were supposed to have filled in the blanks. Those names, like many other documents relating to the scandal, remain unavailable to date.

Quimbo’s explanation aged very quickly. It was convincingly taken down by veteran legislator Tito Sotto.

Sotto says some of our legislators “need to undergo parliamentary rules and procedures workshop.” This is a polite way of saying Quimbo and company do not know what they are talking about.

Sotto educates his colleagues in no uncertain terms. “Ministerial corrections by technical staff,” he says, “are never allowed in any bill, much more a law. You bring it back to plenary.”

This is how

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