The rapporteur for next year’s Budget, senator Marcelo Castro (MDB-PI), said today (13) that if the deputies do not vote on the Proposed Amendment to the Constitution (PEC) of the Transition later this year, the country will experience a ” chaos from a budget point of view”. In this scenario, the country “would stop in the first month of the Lula government”, said the senator.
Castro’s report on the budget proposal already considers the expenses that will only become possible if Congress enacts the PEC. With the proposal, the new government will have fiscal space in the spending ceiling of around BRL 145 billion in the 2023 Budget and another BRL 23 billion in investments outside the cap.
“I don’t have that security [de que será aprovada], but I needed to do my work because the deadline was expiring. I’m counting on the House to act in the same spirit [com] that the Senate acted, approving”, he pointed out.
Officially, the parliamentary recess begins on December 23, as long as the Budget is approved. In practice, if this does not happen within that period, parliamentarians are in a “white recess”, a kind of informal recess.
Timeline
For Marcelo Castro, the ideal thing is for the Chamber of Deputies to analyze the Transition PEC from today to tomorrow and for the Budget Commission to vote on the proposed budget law as early as next Thursday (15). Despite this, if this schedule is not confirmed, and the Chamber postpones the vote on the PEC until next week, the senator believes that there will be time for approval of his report.
deadlock
The vote on the PEC is stalled in the Chamber because of an impasse over the judgment of the constitutionality of the rapporteur’s amendments, the so-called “secret budget”. A group of deputies does not want the analysis of the actions on the subject in the Federal Supreme Court and conditions the appreciation of the PEC to that.
Alternative
To meet the demands for more transparency, efficiency and impersonality in the application of resources, the alternative that is being presented by supporters of the president-elect, Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, is the approval of a draft resolution. According to Castro, according to the proposal under discussion, 80% of the rapporteur’s amendments would be distributed proportionally to the size of the benches in the Chamber, which would have two thirds of the total, while the Senate would have one third. Of the remaining 20%, 5% would go to the Joint Budget Commission, 7.5% to the Senate Board, led by Rodrigo Pacheco (PSD-MG), and 7.5% to the Chamber Board, chaired by Arthur Lira (PP-AL).
“We believe that, with dialogue and understanding, we can reach the modulation that the Supreme Court wants, without the need for it to be declared unconstitutional”, said Castro about the proposal, which has not yet been officially presented.
