Lawmakers\' Work in their Remaining Time in Office

KOMPAS/WISNU WIDIANTORO

House of Representatives Speaker Bambang Soesatyo addresses a plenary session at the House of Representatives Complex in Senayan, Central Jakarta on Wednesday (29/08/2018). The session was to commemorate the 73rd anniversary of the House. In his speech, Bambang Soesatyo said the House’s performance was beginning to improve.

The 2018 session of the House of Representatives ended last week. This should have served as a wake-up call for all 560 lawmakers to finish their work in 2019.

The work of lawmakers is mostly to formulate and pass legislation. According to the 2015-2019 National Legislation Program (Prolegnas), there are 189 bills the House should have deliberated over and passed. However, less than half have been passed so far.

The 2014 to 2019 period of the House of Representatives is to end on Sept. 30, 2019. This means that lawmakers still have nine months left to finish their work before their terms of office end. They may not work effectively as many are to be campaigning for up to five months to secure re-election in 2019.

Many have brought up the issue of the House’s poor performance in terms of legislation from 2014 to 2019. In the lawmakers’ first year in office, namely 2015, only five bills were passed. Compare this to the eight bills passed into law in 2010, the first year of the 2009 to 2014 legislative period.

Throughout 2018, only five bills were passed into law. Kompas records show that the House has passed only 22 bills since 2014, outside of government regulations in lieu of law (perppu) and the annual state budget law. This accounts for only 11 percent of the Prolegnas.

The House speaker once said that the government had a role in the protracted deliberation over bills. The argument was that bills were deliberated over and passed collectively by the government and the House. Other oft-cited reasons include the lack of coordination between the ministries and agencies the President assigns to deliberate over bills, the government’s slowness in submitting problem inventory lists (DIM) and the tendency for ministers to send officials with no authority to make decisions to deliberation meetings.

The amendments of Article 5 Point 1 and Article 20 of the 1945 Constitution stipulate that the House has the authority to create laws. This is different from the original Constitution, which put more emphasis on the role of the executive. With this legal foundation, there is nothing else but for the House to optimize its function of deliberating over bills, no matter what the conditions look like.

We have seen many instances of lawmakers lacking seriousness in House sessions, such as the rarity of those sessions reaching a quorum, which lead to protracted deliberations over bills. Heading toward the 2019 campaign season, such instances are becoming more prevalent.

Passing legislation is essentially the core function of a legislative body. Its other functions, namely control and setting budgets, are parts of the legislative function. Through this function, representatives interpret people’s aspirations into political decisions to be implemented by all involved parties, including the executive and the judiciary. Only lawmakers who are serious in finishing their work are worthy to be called the people’s representatives. Those lacking such a seriousness are not.