Congress Floats the Idea of Granting the President Statutory Emergency Powers to Deal with the Impending Blackouts as Threatened by Meralco

This is the problem when you have a Congress of part-time lawmakers (could mean partly capable of performing one’s lawmaking functions), and full-time “self-interest.” The grant of such emergency powers, by law, as allowed in the Constitution, presupposes the existence of a sudden and extraordinary event that the state or its instrumentalities could not have prepared for, thus necessitating the exercise by the chief executive, again through Congressional grant, of such enormous powers. Such sudden and extraordinary events do not exist in the present situation.

Perennial Congressional Ineptitude.

The predicament we are in now –staggering power rates– is brought about by its (Congress) own perennial ineptitude, sore foresight, and wanton neglect. Now, it wants to administer a shortcut cure to its years of dereliction by granting the president emergency powers. Again, as I have pointed out in the past, the quality of Congressional occupants has terribly deteriorated.

This trouble started when it liberalized the power industry through Electric Power Industry Reform Act (EPIRA), where a power company could operate both distribution and generation business, as is the case in Meralco, and its power generation companies. This law has either inordinate design deliberately sold to beneficiary companies, or its authors simply had poor concept of anti-trust law. Clearly, with such setup allowed, price-fixing among interrelated players, otherwise disallowed, has become legal.

You can’t mistake the wood for the trees.

Malampaya scheduled its maintenance shutdown, as it always does, the other power generating companies (related with distributor Meralco and other power outfits trading on spot market [WESM]), which were supposed to take up the slack, coincided their own maintenance shutdown, forcing Meralco to buy at a higher price from WESM due to this schemed artificial supply situation. That is collusion.

The State has shot itself in the foot.

That is the very situation that led to the quandary the State finds itself in now, and the consuming public threatened with obscene power prices –only temporarily relieved by Supreme Court’s Temporary Restraining Order (TRO).