If you decide in the next elections, Congress will have two possible ways for parliamentary amendments: redivide the value among deputies or raise the ceiling established in the Constitution for these funds, experts say.
The bill that increases the total vacancies from 513 to 531 in May and needs to be voted this week by. Otherwise, it will be up to the (Superior Electoral Court) to update the distribution of vacancies by the population of the states, following the decision of the (Federal Supreme Court).
The president of the Senate, (-ap), placed the theme on the agenda this Wednesday (25) ,, (-PB). Part of the senators, however, has already announced a vote contrary to the proposal alleging the increase in expenses and that of the measure.
The House announced an estimate that the change would cost $ 65 million more per year with salaries and cabinet funds, for example. Asked if any prediction of the impact on the amendments was made for the addition of 18 deputies, but the house did not respond.
“Amendments are a value distributed according to the overall budget. In theory, increasing the number of deputies, it would affect the value,” says Bruno Morassutti, advocacy director of the NGO, are knowing, specializing in access to public information.
Today, the individual amendments that each parliamentarian may indicate in the federal budget are limited by the constitution to 2% of the country’s net current revenue in the previous year – 1,55% shared equally among deputies and 0.45% among senators.
“If they do not move this, the deputies would have to redivide the same current cake,” says researcher Pedro Marin, who is studying the efficiency of spending on a postdoctoral amendment at USP (University of São Paulo).
The total amount intended for amendments in this year’s budget was R $ 59 billion, being R $ 25 billion for individual amendments, amount close to the constitutional ceiling. In practice, each senator has R $ 68 million, and each deputy, of R $ 37 million.
If they did not want to lose some of this money, the congressmen would have to expand the limit once again through a PEC (proposal for amendment to the Constitution) ,. Prior to that, the ceiling for individual amendments was 1.2% of net current revenue.
“I do not doubt to make a new PEC,” says Deputy Adriana Ventura (Novo-SP), coordinator of the Parliamentary Front of Inspection, Integrity and Transparency. What worries her most, however, is the increase in costs with parliamentarians.
It provides a much greater impact than the R $ 65 million calculated by the House and cites, for example, the possibility of a cascade effect on the legislative assemblies of the states, as the Constitution links the number of state deputies to federal.
The complementary bill in debate needs the vote of 41 of the 81 senators to pass and aims to the population data of the 2022 census. The last update was made in 1994, based on the 1985 Census.
The Supreme Court determined in 2023 that Congress makes the adjustment until next Monday (30), otherwise it will be up to the TSE to define the division by October, for the next. In its decision, the Court does not establish that there is an increase in the number of deputies (only one readjustment according to the population).
But when Motta assumed the House presidency earlier this year, he indicated that instead of simply redistributing the number of federal deputies, total chairs, so that no state lost representatives, including his, Paraíba.
In the solution adopted by his countryman, the rapporteur Damião Feliciano (União Brasil), no state would lose places, and nine would win: Pará and Santa Catarina (4 each), Amazonas, Mato Grosso and Rio Grande do Norte (2), Goiás, Ceará, Paraná and Minas Gerais (1).
He states that spending would be absorbed by the current budget at no additional cost.
The vote in the house occurred hurriedly and ended with a score of. The deputies approved the urgency of the project hours earlier, preventing the issue from being taken to discussion in the commissions. In the Senate, urgency was also approved last Wednesday (18).
For the political scientist, professor at FGV (Getúlio Vargas Foundation) and columnist for Sheetthe central problem of debate reform is not the increase in costs – which claims to be relatively low – but a, as it projects.
“For the most current data of the population, Rio de Janeiro, for example, would have to lose four deputies, but it is not losing any. So, proportionally, it will be more benefited by both the proportion of votes and the distribution of amendments,” he says.
Datafolha to increase the number of deputies by the population: 76% of Brazilians say themselves against the measure and only 20%, in favor, while 2% do not know and 1% claim to be indifferent. The survey interviewed 2,004 people on June 10 and 11.
