Yesterday’s vote indicates that the final score will be tight
With five votes in favor of the declaration of unconstitutionality of the secret budget and four against, the Federal Court (Stf) has postponed until next Monday the final decision on the fate of the mechanism that allows the allocation of public resources between parliamentarians without transparency. The vote registered yesterday indicates that the final score will be close.
There is also the possibility that the Court will end up allowing the retention of the secret budget, but with adjustments to ensure some transparency in the transfer of resources. The political use of the mechanism has been revealed by a series of reports from State.
Two judges of the Court remain to vote: Ricardo Lewandowski and Gilmar Mendes. The turning point will be Lewandowski, as it is expected that Gilmar will choose to follow the proposal made by the Congress to give transparency to the resources indicated by the parliamentarians, in exchange for the conservation of the so-called amendments of the rapporteur.
At the end of yesterday’s session, Lewandowski and Gilmar praised the initiative of the President of the Congress, Senator Rodrigo Pacheco (PSD-MG), to present an adjustment proposal in the amendment mode.
The Legislature says it will reveal the names of MPs who sponsored the sending of money to strongholds, which does not happen in the secret budget. It was also promised to establish limits on the values ​​individually indicated by deputies and senators through the general rapporteur of the budget to the national Congress.
ILLEGAL
Yesterday the third session of the STF took place in the judgment of four cases asking for the repeal of the secret budget. Ministers Edson Fachin, LuĂs Roberto Barroso, Luiz Fux and Cármen LĂşcia accompanied rapporteur Rosa Weber, who classified the secret budget as “incompatible with the constitutional, democratic and republican order”.
Ministers André Mendonça, Kassio Nunes Marques, Alexandre de Moraes and Dias Toffoli defended that Congress should only be required to provide transparency to the transfers, as well as adopting a set of criteria to indicate the values.
“The judiciary lacks the essential elements, nor the institutional mission, to evaluate the success or failure of parliamentary decisions on the budget,” Nunes Marques said in the vote. Again according to the minister, “the greater the power of the Legislative over the Budget, the more democratic the country is”.
CORRECTION
Moraes admitted that there is a lack of transparency in how to distribute the resources created by Congress with the approval of the Jair Bolsonaro government. “It is impossible not to identify who proposed (the indication of the amendments). The population has the right to know who indicated, where and why,” he said. He underlined that the secret budget has generated “absence of control and false declarations”. However, the minister said he understands the Supreme Court shouldn’t eliminate the mechanism that can be corrected by Congress itself.
Minister Edson Fachin, on the other hand, sided with the vote of the president of the STF, Rosa Weber, and deemed the scheme sponsored by the legislature illegal. “There is no transparency when the objective criteria for the priority election are not clarified”, he pointed out.
IMBALANCE
Along the same lines, Barroso said that Congress cannot have more powers than the President of the Republic and the secret budget causes distortions. “There is a clear imbalance in the allocation of public resources which takes away from the Executive the capacity for global planning in exchange for parochial choices, which are to some extent legitimate, but which cannot be satisfied by this amendment mechanism”, he said. he said.
According to Fux, his vote could be summed up in a single sentence: “With public money, secrecy is not the soul of business”. Toffoli, in turn, defended the legislator’s ability to indicate the destination of public resources, but he also asked for greater transparency in the mechanism used by deputies.
In the vote, Toffoli argued that, currently, the rapporteur’s amendments, in the so-called secret budget, are confused with individual amendments, «pulverizing the use of scarce resources in parish projects, without paying attention to strategic planning and national scope, as well as not to observe isonomy in distribution, allowing selective presence of requests”. For him, budget amendments must follow the principles of transparency, proportionality, impartiality and isonomy.
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Source: Terra
Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.
