Chamber of Deputies approves PEC of Precatório in 2nd round of voting

The Chamber of Deputies approved in the vote in the second round of the Proposed Amendment to the Constitution (PEC) of the Precatório on Tuesday night (9). There were 323 votes in favor and 172 against. There is still a need to analyze four highlights of suppression before the text is sent to the Federal Senate, where it will also be voted on in two rounds.

As a rule, the PEC vote must take place in two rounds, with at least 308 votes in each of them, to be approved or rejected.

Throughout this Tuesday, deputies analyzed 11 highlights of the basic text of the proposal, approved in the first round at dawn on Thursday (4) with 312 votes in favour. Of the 11 highlights – devices that allow changes to the content of the article – one was accepted.

Negotiations

Since last Monday (8), the Planalto Palace has been working to garner votes among parliamentarians. That’s because, last week, during the first round vote, the PEC was approved by only four votes more than the minimum necessary.

However, the day began with a setback for the governing base, which lost votes from PDT deputies. After criticism from the former governor of Ceará Ciro Gomes and the suspension of his candidacy for the presidency, the party pressured the parliamentarians who had voted in favor of the PEC in the first round. With that, after a meeting in the beginning of this Tuesday afternoon, the party directed a vote against the proposal, causing the government to lose about 10 votes within the party.

Even so, the government continued to exert pressure. Deputies from the base were called to vote, in an attempt to increase the quorum, which, in the first round, had been 456 parliamentarians. At the same time, pressure on parties such as the MDB, PSDB and PSB increased, both from the government and from the opposition, which continued to obstruct votes.

Understand

The Bolsonaro government’s commitment to opening fiscal space in 2022 to finance the new social program Auxílio Brasil, which replaces Bolsa Família, the initial purpose of the precatório PEC was to postpone and split the payment of the Union’s debt in precatório and court rulings . The amount for next year is almost R$90 billion.

With mandatory payment provided for in the Federal Constitution, court orders are debts owed by the government to individuals, legal entities, or even from a federation entity to another, already definitively decided – final and unappealable – by the Judiciary. The debt can be owed by municipalities, states or the Union.

In the midst of negotiations, the text gained provisions that expand the spending ceiling and circumvent other fiscal rules. According to the Ministry of Economy, the space opened up by the proposal will be around R$91 billion, R$44.6 billion of which is the result of the sub-ceiling stipulated for the payment of court orders and another R$47 billion due to the change in the ceiling correction rule of spending.

Auxílio Brasil alone will be responsible for consuming R$ 50 billion of the total amount. Part of the remaining funds should be used to increase the amount to be transferred to parliamentarians in 2022 through amendments to reports, known as RP9, and the electoral fund.