ON SENATE BILLS

Loi, Miriam send in the clones

By Efren L. Danao, Senior Reporter  Science can clone sheep and other animals. The Senate, it seems, can clone a piece of legislation. Senators Luisa Ejercito Estrada and Miriam Defensor Santiago have filed separate bills that are strikingly similar. The question is, who copied from whom? Estrada filed Senate Bill 94 on June 30, 2004; Santiago filed Senate Bill 1453 on July 22, 2004. The bill number, the date of filing and the name of the authors are about the only differences that set the two bills apart. Both bills have the same title: An Act Establishing an Office on Women’s Health Within the Department of Health. The bills do not differ in the way they phrase the explanatory note and provisions, down to the commas, parentheses, quotation marks, semicolons and other punctuation marks. This is the first case of “identical bills” filed in the same Congress that The Manila Times has noticed in the Senate. At the start of the Thirteenth Congress, the Senate minority leader, Aquilino Pimentel Jr., complained that a bill he had filed but had been archived in the Twelfth Congress was refiled by a new senator without informing him and without seeking his permission. He said a bill filed by a senator is deemed to be that legislator’s intellectual property right. But the case involving Senate Bills 94 and 1453 is different from Pimentel’s experience because they were filed in the same Thirteenth Congress. The two bills are so similar that it could not possibly be merely coincidental. Santiago is an intellectual, a deep thinker, and it is unthinkable to accuse her of usurping a bill Estrada filed 22 days earlier. So what happened? One explanation is that some bureaucrats who thought of establishing an Office on Women’s Health under the Department of Health had submitted draft bills to the two women senators. The draft bills appear to have been so well crafted that neither Estrada nor Santiago found it necessary to make changes. Estrada, who was elected senator in the Twelfth Congress, filed hers first—on the very day that the members of the Thirteenth Congress, including Santiago, were sworn into office. Apparently, Santiago filed her bill without being informed by her legislative officers and researchers that a similar bill had been filed earlier. Senators, as well as congressmen, receive proposals from various sectors on what bill should be filed. Recently, Santiago filed a bill based on proposals submitted by five participants in her 2005 summer internship program. She acknowledged the contributions of the five interns. Similar embarrassing incidents could recur unless the Senate bills and index section and the researchers of senators do more spadework and alert a senator that a draft bill submitted by a certain sector had already been filed. There is absolutely no need for senators to insist on filing bills when the subject and most of the provisions are also the subject and provisions of a filed measure—unless, of course, if the senator is out to grab the credit even if it meant cluttering the Senate order of business