Since the government’s controversial media bill was still being debated in the Senate when this editorial was written with its exact outcome uncertain, we perhaps need another example to examine the crisis in parliamentary institutions and federalism — precisely the mother of all bills and the cornerstone of parliamentary prerogative, namely the 2010 budget, lends itself very readily to this purpose. On Thursday the Lower House Budget Committee approved the draft budget with hardly a comma altered and not a further cent conceded to the provinces — once again priority was given to procedural speed at the expense of the institutional quality preached by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in her 2007 election campaign and at the expense of federalism. It is the indecent haste with which the media bill is being passed which makes it a mockery of the law and institutional quality apart from violating property rights and the freedom of expression. Both a media bill which atomizes inland cable television and a budget which refuses to share such levies as the cheque tax with the provinces or to improve a perverse federal revenue-sharing system which was to have been reformed along with the Constitution in 1994 are profoundly anti-federal.
Perhaps even more than the media bill, the budget is a good starting-point for looking at the institutional crisis of a Congress debased by the mobilization of pressured and purchased votes on an unprecedented scale this week because so many parliaments around the world were born out of budgetary approval. Although supposedly the central focus of parliamentary activity, the budget has until now received far less attention from all sides, neither being given the same sense of urgency by the executive branch nor the same number of amendments in the Lower House (none of which served to disarm the media bill in any way apart from the anachronistically political decision to exclude telephones from the multimedia). No doubt this inability to take the budget seriously is due to the “superpowers” and the ease with which Cabinet Chief Aníbal Fernández could be given 32 billion extra pesos to assign but it is precisely in removing such bypasses that institutional reform must begin.
Perhaps there is a certain logic in Congress voting to extend its own Babylonian captivity to the media by approving a media bill which does far more to restore the spirit of military dictatorship than to adjust its letter to irreversible technological changes but without freedom, what is the point of either parliamentary or press institutions?