*Dr. Rodolfo John Ortiz Teope, PhD, EdD
The 1987 Constitution is clear: a bill must pass both the House and the Senate in the same form before it becomes law. But it is silent on how disagreements should be resolved. Into that silence, Congress created the bicameral conference committee—the bicam. It is not in the Constitution, but it has become the bridge between the two chambers.
Borrowed from the U.S. system and carried into our own since the 1935 Constitution, the bicam was supposed to be practical: send a few members from each chamber, let them hammer out the differences, and return with one final version. No more debate, no more amendments. On paper, it was efficiency. In reality, it became an opening for abuse.
Behind closed doors, the bicam became fertile ground for betrayal. Provisions never debated in Congress suddenly appear in laws. Billions are quietly inserted into the budget. Critics call it the “third chamber of Congress,” a chamber that no Filipino ever voted for, a chamber the Constitution never authorized. Instead of a bridge, it turned into a backdoor. And the Supreme Court, time and again, has looked away, calling it Congress’s internal business.
The consequences are devastating. Look at the Flood Control scandal. Billions of pesos were funneled into projects that existed only on paper or were grotesquely overpriced. These were not debated in plenary. They were slipped in during bicam negotiations, in the shadows, where accountability is weakest. What should have been money for classrooms, hospitals, and disaster readiness was hijacked to enrich the few.
It’s like teenagers planning a school dance. The boys want hip-hop in the basketball court, the girls want acoustic in the gym. They form a small committee to compromise. But instead of blending the plans, the committee secretly hires an expensive DJ and orders catering no one asked for. When the final plan is revealed, both groups are stunned—the party is no longer theirs. That is what happens when Filipinos wake up to a national budget full of hidden insertions.
The bicam was meant to harmonize. Instead, it became a tunnel for plunder. Institutions built only on tradition, not on constitutional safeguards, depend on the honesty of those who run them. When honesty is gone, only betrayal remains.
If Nepal’s Gen Z revolution shows us anything, it is that young people will not tolerate corruption forever. Filipino youth are watching. They know their future is being stolen peso by peso, scam by scam. And just like the teens betrayed by their party organizers, they too may soon rise and say: enough.
The truth is plain: the bicam is not the real enemy—it is just one defect of the 1987 Constitution. The system itself is broken. It is filled with loopholes, contradictions, and weak safeguards that allow corruption to thrive. The bicam is only one crack, but it connects to every fracture in our political foundation. We cannot keep patching holes. To cure the disease, we must change the system itself. And to change the system, we must be bold enough to change the entire Constitution.
How many more budgets must be hijacked before classrooms are built? How many more scandals before roads are paved honestly, before floodwaters are truly controlled, before hope is restored? Every peso lost to insertions is a stolen dream. Every scandal is a wound in our democracy.
We cannot keep dancing to the music of corruption. It is time to write a new song—under a new system, guided by a new Constitution that finally serves the Filipino people.
___________________________
