“A great deal of legislative work happens quietly”

A great deal depends on parliamentary dynamics and on the sectoral opinions produced about a particular bill. The normal process is for the committee responsible for the report to consult ministries, institutions and specialists about the terms of the bill. Depending on those views, the consensus that emerges, political pressure and other social and economic factors, the text can change completely.

In other words, the bill is not the last word. It is quite the opposite. The idea within parliamentary practice is always to improve it. Members of Congress say that a law can always be improved, and that is what the legislative process is: the sectors with expertise in the subject try to make it better.

There is also something that remains somewhat hidden, which is that certain groups can sometimes wield considerable power to block an issue. A very good bill may run against the interests of a particular sector, and that sector may try to keep it from ever being debated, or influence decision makers to take a position against it. So external factors matter greatly, for good, when they enrich the debate, or for harm, when they block it.

To begin with, we must remember that Parliament is also a political institution. Everything defined in a rule or procedure will always be subject to the political decisions of the people who are there.

In the Peruvian system, the person who chairs a committee has a great deal of power. They decide the agenda, which means what will and will not be considered, and they choose the members of the technical team that analyzes committee reports. A deputy or senator in that position can direct the approach taken in the analysis of a law.

One unwritten rule is that a bill without supporting opinions is unlikely to receive a committee report. That is not stated in any manual or rule, but it is obvious in practice. A legislator may be in a great hurry to have an issue approved, but if no ministry, civil society organization or other institution provides an opinion or support, the person responsible for the report will ask what backing there is for advancing a bill when nobody else has expressed a favorable view.

Procedures also have deadlines, but those deadlines are formal requirements that are not met in practice because this is, again, a political sphere. Current events determine what is considered first. There is no order of precedence either. Bill 001 does not take priority over bill 010. That gives the person chairing the committee room for political management.

Our Congress does not have a continuous tradition going back fifty years. Peru went through many political changes and several military regimes. The Constitution dates from 1993, and before the 1960s we had congresses that sat for a period, left and operated under a different Constitution. The closest precedent for our current reality began with the 1979 Constitution, which produced two bicameral congresses, and that ended in 1992. So it only makes sense to speak of continuous parliamentary practices from 1995 onward, when we had the unicameral Congress that lasted until 2026.

As I remember it, bills used to be assessed with greater technical objectivity. But these are less imposed practices than matters of logic: how can you ask me to advance a bill if I do not even know whether it is sound?

What is true, and is fortunately being corrected under this bicameral Congress, is that declaratory bills will no longer exist. These are rules that declare the construction of a hospital or school to be in the national interest. They distorted the debate considerably because, unfortunately, most members of Congress made them a priority in their initiatives. I do not have the figures, but perhaps as much as half of Congress’s human resources were devoted to them in recent years, and much of the technical debate was lost.

A great deal will change, starting with the fact that there are two chambers. In my work I used to follow what 130 members were doing, and now there are 190. Anyone following the debates must understand that the position taken by a committee in the Chamber of Deputies will not be the same as the one taken in the Senate. It is a double process, twice the work, with more people examining each issue.

I think that is healthy because we have sometimes had bad experiences with rules approved without sufficient debate. The positive side is that there will be more scrutiny, more analysis and more hope that legislation leaving Congress will have passed through a better filter.

The negative side is that political considerations could create deadlocks, leaving technical considerations aside while political ones carry more weight. Depending on the relationship between senators and deputies, matters could be blocked along the way. That is the risk, and it is still an interesting challenge. There will probably also be scheduling conflicts because the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies will hold sittings at the same time.

The most important thing I realized while working in Congress is that a great deal of legislative work happens quietly and is not public. No adviser will come and tell you how something happened or whom they spoke with. That often remains hidden. When negative stories about Congress emerge, this lack of visibility encourages citizens to associate the work of members of Congress with corruption, political favors and other negative ideas.

Working inside made me value public service greatly. There are many valuable people in Congress, and in the Peruvian state more broadly, who do their jobs and try to do them as well as possible. Unfortunately, some of the merit based culture that once existed has been lost in recent years because political favors entered the dynamic and standards fell. Even so, many good public servants work hard and have a genuine desire to serve.

My view from outside now is that, when you are inside, you unintentionally assume there are good people and bad people. Later you realize that nobody in politics is inherently bad and nobody else is Superman. We are human. Some legislators will hold positions that are very extreme or difficult to share, but the role of someone doing advocacy is to set passion aside and focus on the objectives. They are all representatives. Nobody arrived in Congress through magic. They were elected, so they have the legitimacy to express their views. You have to identify what creates empathy and what interests a legislator, then see whether that aligns with your objectives. All members of Congress have value and deserve respect because each one holds the power of a vote.

Objectively speaking, I once compared the legislative output of the previous Congress with others and there was not much difference. What did make a difference was the number of declaratory bills, which greatly inflated the body of proposed rules. People who monitor the process say there is too much regulation because, to them, a bill is a bill. They do not look closely at what each one contains.

This bicameral parliament will provide better filters, and I think that will resolve the problem because declaratory proposals can no longer be introduced as bills. They may be submitted as motions or political declarations, but not as bills. That already filters out a large part of what used to be on the agenda. With the filter provided by two chambers, we will have better legislation and less legislation.

There is also something very important that people should know: anyone with an interest in public policy has a voice in the discussion. You do not need to belong to Congress or the executive branch to express a view. The digital case file allows a person to enter their national identity number and submit an opinion on a bill. It does not remain only on the website. The responsible body must send an official letter to the committee stating which people submitted views that week or month and what those views were. That does not guarantee their opinion will be included in the committee report, but there is an obligation to consider it at least in part.

I say this as an ordinary citizen. Any institution, nongovernmental organization, company or trade association can use the virtual filing desk and send a message saying whether it considers a particular bill good or bad, and the opinion is recorded. There is very little awareness of this. I imagine some people do not understand it or do not want to become involved because it seems difficult. But we all have a role in following what Congress does, and there are tools for expressing our opinions. Advocacy is another level, but the most basic form of participation is within reach.

Artificial intelligence is a tool. It will not replace people. The initial view it provides is very useful for someone who must follow many issues on the same day. You can search for a keyword and see what was said. If the prime minister spoke about fishing or mining, you can identify what was said, in which excerpt and at what time, and gain an initial understanding of the direction of the discussion. You can also review sectoral opinions to see whether they addressed a specific topic. It helps enormously during that initial information gathering stage.

I imagine it will become better trained over time and develop into a stronger tool, capable of showing what the same legislator has said about an issue over an extended period. It can be given more information and provide more elements for analytical decisions. I think that is positive and has great potential because many tasks require research and there are not always enough people. Peru is moving to two chambers, which means there will be more to monitor and even overlapping sittings.

The important point is to see it as a complementary tool. I do not think it will replace a person, at least not now. It is important for those responsible to make that clear because it would be disastrous to give more weight to a tool than to a person who disagrees but has greater familiarity or experience with the issue. There are no absolutes. Just as people are not infallible, neither are digital tools.

Normally, unless there is a specific agreement by the governing board, everything left partway through the process is archived, even if it had a committee report and was on the plenary agenda. The justification is that the legislative term has ended.

There are exceptional cases. I remember that when the 2021 Congress began, they said foreign affairs committee reports would remain active, but only in that specific case because those rules came from the executive branch and were not part of the normal process. They came from the state itself. Apart from that, everything ends in the state it has reached.

The only possibility is for a member of Congress to request what is called an update. A deputy may ask for a bill left pending in the previous Congress to be updated. But it is like copying and pasting. It is a valid procedure, although it would be more logical to update it by changing and improving parts of it. It is like a magic wand that brings the bill back, but it returns at the starting point. It must receive a committee report again and begin from zero. So in principle nothing will survive, and as far as I know the governing board has not agreed otherwise.