Is this his legacy?

Senate President Franklin M. Drilon said today President Aquino will be remembered in history as someone who remained true to his mandate of good governance.

"What we have achieved today can be credited to the basic premise of good governance," Drilon said as Congress prepared to resume its third regular session next week with President Aquino delivering his last State-of-the-Nation Address on Monday, July 27.

Drilon pointed out that President Aquino had maintained a productive relationship with Congress in the past five years.

Drilon said reform laws which for years had languished in the legislative mill were passed during the Aquino administration. Among these are the Fair Competition Act and the amendments to the Cabotage Law, which the President signed recently.

Other laws that Drilon said had been finally passed by Congress after being placed in the backburner for many years included those pertaining to Reproductive Health, sin taxes, reform of government-owned and controlled corporations (GOCCs) and the entry of more foreign banks into country.

"These measures are really consistent with and in support of the reform agenda of the President so that whoever sits in Malacañang after 2016 should

continue the policies that are already in place," Drilon said.

The Senate leader said he expects  the President to tell Congress and the people in his SONA what he would do in his last year in office to preserve whatever gains were made during the past five years.

"Particularly, I would like to hear the President outline what he intends to do in order to improve basic government services like the MRT. I would like to hear what the President will say in order to hasten government spending because of the specter of underspending which harms our economy," Drilon said.

Drilon said he had already met with the leadership of the House of Representatives to monitor their legislative agenda.

"We have agreed that we will give the highest priority to six measures. These are the Bangsamoro Basic Law, the 2016 National Budget, the creation of the Department of Information, Communication and Technology, the amendments to the built-operate-and-transfer law to strengthen our private-public partnership, the modernization of PAG-ASA modernization, and the Freedom of Information (FOI) bill," the Senate leader said.

Apart from these, Drilon said, there are about 15 other measures which the legislature will consider "but we don’t want to raise expectations as we have only six months to work on the six priority bills and the 15 other measures which we have agreed to monitor." –End-