271059/271347/E-02472/E-04036 Dissenting Opinion: Justice Antonio T. Kho, Jr. — Official PDF

Dissenting Opinion 7 G.R. Nos. 271059, 271347 E-02472 & E-04036 Article VII, Section 22, Article VI, Section 25(1 ), and Article VI, Section 29(1) of the Constitution must be read together. They establish an ordered allocation of fiscal responsibility: the President prepares and submits a complete, integrated fiscal program; Congress reviews and enacts the appropriations; the President implements them; and the Commission on Audit examines whether funds were used according to law. The order under the Constitution is purposely deliberate. Budget preparation precedes legislation, and legislation precedes execution. No branch may leave its constitutional task unfinished and authorize another branch to complete it later. The present system of unprogrammed appropriations disrupts this ordered constitutional process. Congress may identify broad categories and maximum amounts. Once a fiscal trigger occurs, however, the Executive will choose which projects receive funds, how much each receives, and which are postponed or denied. In substance, it is the Executive that completes the allocation under the unprogrammed approp1iations that Congress failed to settle in the GAA. An appropriation is complete when Congress has set apart a deterniznate or determinable amount for a sufficiently specified public purpose. A maximum ceiling coupled with a broad heading under an unprogramined appropriation is not enough when both the actual purpose and actual amount remain for later determination. In Belgica v. Ochoa, Jr., 32 the Court invalidated a system that permitted substantive project identification after enactment because such identification formed an integral part of legislative power of appropriation, to wit: Thus, for all the foregoing reasons, the Court hereby declares the 2013 PDAF Article as well as all other provisions of law which similarly allow legislators to wield any form of post-enactment authority in the irnplementation or enforcement of the budget, unrelated to congressional oversight, as violative of the separation of powers principle and thus unconstitutional. Corollary thereto, informal practices, through which legislators have effectively intrnded into the proper phases of budget execution, must be deemed as acts of grave abuse of discretion amounting to lack or excess" of jurisdiction and, hence, accorded the same unconstitutional treatment. Ultimately, legislators cannot exercise powers which they do not have, whether through formal measures written into the Jaw or informal practices institutionalized in government agencies, else the Executive department be deprived of what the Constitution has vested as its own. 33 32 721 Phil. 416 (2013) [Per J. Perlas Bernabe, En Banc]. 33 Id. at 544-545.