Billion PEC vote is postponed in House committee

A collective view request postponed for two sessions the vote on the report by deputy Danilo Forte (União-CE) on the PEC (proposed amendment to the Constitution) that authorizes billions for truck drivers, taxi drivers and Auxílio Brasil in an election year.

The report was read at the special commission on Tuesday night (5), after the session of Congress that analyzed presidential vetoes. In order to anticipate the opposition’s request, a collective view was granted to the opinion. The expectation is that the vote in the collegiate will take place on Thursday (7). Afterwards, the text goes to the plenary, where it needs the minimum support of 308 deputies, in a two-round vote.

Left parties had already announced that they were going to obstruct the process. During the committee meeting, Novo also increased the obstruction and made a point of order to try to delay the vote.

For the opposition leader, Wolney Queiroz (PDT-PE), the text processing, as it was done, “is a mockery”. “It is a poorly conceived, electoral project that is not concerned with people, but with votes.”

At the meeting, Deputy Alencar Santana (PT-SP) tried to appeal to the article of the Transitional Constitutional Provisions Act, which says that the PEC procedure, “when it leads to an increase in expenses or a waiver of revenue, will be suspended for up to 20 days, upon request of one fifth of the members of the House, in the regimental terms, for analysis of its compatibility with the New Fiscal Regime.”

The commission’s president, Celina Leão (PP-DF), an ally of President Arthur Lira (PP-AL), denied the point of order and said that the suspension of the proceedings was not among the attributions of the collegiate presidency. Only the board of directors or higher instance could suspend it, according to the deputy.

The opposition tried to take the reading of the opinion until the dawn of Wednesday (6) to win another day of voting. The rapporteur began to read the text in the midst of an attempt to obstruct deputies from the PT and other left-wing parties. Celina Leão ordered the parliamentarians to return to their seats and said she would not be disrespected.

Forte read the report and Celina Leão granted a collective view before midnight. With the maneuver, the request was granted on Tuesday night, ensuring that the vote could take place on Thursday.

Last Friday (1st), an act by the Board of Directors added the PEC to another proposal that was already being processed in the Chamber and which deals with biofuels. As a result, the text did not need to be analyzed by the CCJ, the main committee of the House, which analyzes the admissibility of PECs. In addition, the decision also shortened another process, as the other biofuels proposal was already in the special commission, a stage in which the merits are analyzed.

To speed up the vote in the Chamber, Danilo Forte gave up making changes to the texts approved in the Senate and released a report in which he merges the texts of the two PECs into a substitute.

“With the armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the fuel market in the world has suffered severe impacts, which have repercussions on other segments of society,” he wrote. “Among the most harmful systemic effects of the increase in fuels, we cite inflation, which causes the deterioration of the population’s purchasing power and penalizes the less favored segments of society.”

He cited, in the opinion, the projects approved by Congress to minimize the impact of fuel prices and said that one of the side effects of these measures was the reduction of the competitiveness of biofuels.

Forte also praised the PEC dos billions, which “is exactly to institute a state of emergency to expand the payment of benefits, because, in the face of the elections, this would not be possible without violating the legal system and constitutional commandments.”

In the substitute, Forte says that the measures will be in force until the end of the year, “when the electoral legislation will no longer be an obstacle for the benefits to be approved, then, on a permanent basis.”

Earlier, when leaving a meeting with President Arthur Lira at the official residence of the Chamber, the rapporteur explained why he gave up on implementing changes in the text.

According to him, to include application drivers in the payment of aid there was the additional obstacle of the lack of an effective registration of these professionals. “So there’s no way you can safely scale the application drivers to be able to offer the benefit of aid”, he added.

PEC 15 seeks to maintain a favored regime for biofuels. The text adds an item to the article of the Constitution that deals with the right of all Brazilians to an ecologically balanced environment, to seek to guarantee an advantageous tax situation for non-polluting fuels.

The text does not exactly establish the tax rates that must be levied on biofuels. These percentages must be established by means of a supplementary law. As long as the complementary law is not approved by Congress, this competitive differential for biofuels in relation to fossil fuels will be guaranteed by maintaining the difference in rates applied to the two types at the level in force on May 15 this year.

Already the PEC of billions, approved by the Senate last Thursday, institutes a state of emergency to allow President Jair Bolsonaro to break the spending ceiling and open public coffers three months from the elections.

The text gives the government the go-ahead to boost social programs until the end of the year without running into restrictions in the electoral law, which exist to prevent the use of the public machine in favor of any candidate. Bolsonaro ranks second in polls, behind former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT).

The PEC brings measures that will have a total cost of BRL 41.25 billion – a value greater than the BRL 38.75 billion originally agreed, in yet another move to increase the bill. When the measures to tackle the rise in fuel prices began to be discussed, the extra expense was projected at R$ 29.6 billion.

The text provides for the temporary expansion of Auxílio Brasil by R$200, bringing the minimum benefit to R$600 by the end of the year, and authorizes the government to create an aid for self-employed truck drivers, in addition to doubling the value of Auxílio Gás.

There is also a R$ 2 billion benefit for taxi drivers and a forecast to increase by R$ 500 million resources for the Alimenta Brasil program, which finances the purchase of food for donation to low-income families.