Party-list system: A failure

That silly party-list system will have to go, sometime in the near future, because clearly, it has been abused through the years, and will continue to be abused — even by the so-called “cause-oriented groups.”

What this system has become is for many party-listers to enter Congress through the backdoor and end up having the congressional perks and more importantly for them, raking in millions — in pork barrel funds, which do not necessarily go to those constituents they claim to represent.

The truth is, even those party-listers who claim to represent the poor and the marginalized, as well as the leftists who do not seem to want anyone else other than their groups and those ideologically attuned to them, to become members of Congress, never once bared just where their pork barrel funds go, because for all the years that they have been serving as congressmen and getting all that pork, the same claimed marginalized groups they say they represent are still living under the same poverty-ridden conditions. Besides which, when they are aligned with the elite majority, their voices are voluntarily muted as they are in support of the administration — until they cut off and join the opposition forces.

Truth is, some of these party-listers have made oodles of money, enough for them to seek a higher seat and spend millions for their campaign.

The system clearly has been abused — and if you ask me, even by the cause-oriented groups.

An original leftist group, to cite one example, has split into two or three parties, but are still in the so-called marginal party-list representation.

The idea in splitting up was to get more of their members getting into Congress through the backdoor, even when these party-listers belong to the same mother group that moreover represents the same constituents — and these are supposed to be on a nationwide basis.

Surely, that too, is some form of abuse of the party-list system since the constituents are one and the same.

Similarly, the party-list system is being abused when an organization is suddenly formed, with its supposed first choice of representative certainly not representative of that group, but some elite official, such as a former Cabinet official, who has no chance of becoming an elected senator, much less a regular congressman representing a district. So he goes into the party-list system under a group that is claimed to be marginalized.

There are also those party-listers whose group can hardly be categorized as marginalized, such as a business group. Business is a marginalized sector? Yet there these party-listers are, in Congress, enjoying the same perks, allowances, bonuses, and their millions in pork barrel, without the Filipino taxpayers ever knowing just where the pork barrel went, since there is never a liquidation of that pork barrel funds — at least even in the soft component of the pork, as this is really where the cash is, rather than the infrastructure projects earmarked by the national government, or more specifically, the administration.

Money is of course still made through the hard component in the pork, by the congressmen if a national project — whether a bridge, real or ghost, school buildings, or the like — is to be contracted by a company where the congressman is the owner, or part owner, with the usual fronts.

Because the party-list system has failed, and due to the abuse of the system, the time for the party-list system to die is coming soon, when a constitutional convention comes into play.

But these party-listers have no one to blame but themselves for the likely death of this system.

They screwed it. –Ninez Cacho-Olivares, Daily Tribune