- Opposition walks out of the Senate
The walkout by the Opposition from the Senate may have appeared to some as caused by a fit of pique, but one of the principles of parliamentary government seems to have been at stake, which was the ability of government to bypass Parliament in legislation. The catalyst for the incident was the laying before the House of four ordinances and the refusal of the Chair to relax the rules to allow the admission of resolutions of disapproval. Leader of the Opposition in the Senate Raja Zafarul Haq said that government was trying to legislate by using its power to promulgate ordinances even though they did not fulfil the requirements of Article 89 of the Constitution.
The power to issue ordinances goes back to the Raj, which gave its governors power to issue laws because it did not trust native legislatures to pass laws if an emergency arose. One ordinance can be promulgated when neither House is in session. Governments had developed the practise of issuing ordinances, and then re-issuing them after they expired, and using their own power of summoning and proroguing the legislature to control whether or not the House was in session. The Supreme Court had ruled this practise unconstitutional, thus clipping some of the power of the executive to legislate.
The executive is constantly reminding the legislature of the need for it to legislate. However, it should remember that when it itself usurps its function by misusing the emergency power of promulgating ordinances, it only invites member of the legislature to usurp the function of the executive, which extends to legislators interfering in the functioning of the police and the award of government contracts for road construction, all in the name of supervising development. The constitutional scheme was designed to provide checks and balances. If a party controls the National Assembly, it is put in charge of the executive, but to obtain the power of legislation, either it must wait until it obtains control of the Senate, or it makes the compromises needed to win the support of the parties controlling the Senate. It does not try to bypass Parliament. That way lies dictatorship, and is surely not the path the government wants to take. It would do better to respect the people’s mandate by legislating according to the spirit of the Constitution.
