As the US House of Representatives wrestled with the bailout plan for Wall Street, “insertions” in the bailout bill passed by the US Senate became a heated topic for debate. Senators had put in all sorts of goodies for their constituencies, ranging from the $192 million for the Puerto Rican rum industry, to the $100 million for the Nascar racing car circuit, to the $200 million for the wooden arrow manufacturing industry. House members complained; but with the eyes of the world on them, they ended up passing the Senate version lock, stock, and thickly larded pork barrel.

The American experience suggests that members of Congress aren’t beyond using even a global economic emergency to prove that all politics is local. And what holds true for American legislators holds even truer for their Filipino counterparts. The only difference might be that even when larding bills, American legislators have their local economies in mind while our homegrown legislators seem too lazy and subservient to think their insertions through.

Instead of insertions in the budget to pander to the businesses and industries of their constituents, our legislators have shown themselves inclined to make insertions along two broad lines. First, for specific infrastructure projects which may redound to their benefit not necessarily in the form of kickbacks, but certainly in the form of real estate improvements. Second, to provide for broad slush funds (lump sums for vaguely-defined purposes) the release of which still require the legislators’ pandering to whoever is chief executive.

The advantage of both schemes is, although not precisely for the public good, they do avoid many legal minefields. When asked about the various insertions in this year’s budget, former Cabinet officials Benjamin Diokno and Leonor Briones both pointed out that the millions, even billions, of pesos involved were, on their face, quite legal both in their method and application. This is an opinion not far removed from the jaded observations of senators and congressmen that all the fuss being made over their budgetary shenanigans is merely making mountains out of molehills.

The reason, however, that politicians are finding themselves on the defensive, as far as their budgetary practices are concerned, reveals the real issues at hand. First, that what may be small from a congressional or presidential point of view involves significant and even shocking amounts in the eyes of a poverty-struck population. Second, the public cannot find even the smallest mitigating factor in these budgetary goings-on which promote not the public interest but provide for horse-trading among elected officials and their bureaucratic counterparts.

And third, the first two underline how the legislature and the chief executive maintain a fundamentally predatory attitude toward the allocation and spending of our taxes; and how least concerned they are in being accountable and visionary when it comes to using those funds.

Finally, the way the whole process is slanted toward handing over giant fistfuls of cash to the presidency reveals just how utterly devoid of spine and constitutional self-awareness the nominally equal legislature is. We have long hammered away at the importance of the power of the purse. That is, the principle that the national representatives of the electorate in Congress have the ultimate control over public spending.

Yet because of the flawed nature of our present Charter and the submissiveness and cupidity of our representatives in both houses, for all intents and purposes, it is our presidents—like the absolute monarchs of old—who possess the power to tax and spend.

The best that legislators seem capable of is the rather amusing sight of the rotund Rep. Ronaldo Zamora calling for a budgetary diet—the slimming down to be done mainly by the chief executive. Neither he nor any other legislator seems interested in actually calling for real reform. Instead, Congress is poised to amend the Constitution, not to recover its lost power of the purse, but instead to protect the cozy status quo enjoyed by the ruling coalition.