PDP notes ‘worst start’ at signing legislation since Pedro Rosselló and a shared gov’t
By The Star Staff
As the leadership of the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) sees it, Jenniffer González Colón “wanted to be governor, but did not want to govern.”
“How is it possible that two months into her government, having obtained a victory on November 5, she had time to prepare?” PIP Secretary General Juan Dalmau Ramírez said Sunday in a press conference. “She has not named more than 50 percent of the agency heads. Supposedly she had more than 5,000 resumes on a website and, however, she has not been able to achieve that. And some of her appointments have not even been evaluated in the Senate of Puerto Rico or in the Senate and the House.”
“In the case of what has to do with legislation, her first legislation was to legalize what is illegal in La Parguera, but there has been no legislation aimed at addressing the country’s problems,” added Dalmau Ramírez, who finished second to González Colón in the voting for governor last November. “What happened with the cancellation of the LUMA contract? Now she says that that is for later, because first we have to focus on gasification in Puerto Rico, continuing the use of fossil fuels and further enriching Genera Puerto Rico. So those are examples of how Jenniffer González wanted to be governor, to access power, to protect her closest circles, but she had no intention of governing for the general well-being of Puerto Rico.”
PIP Sen. María de Lourdes Santiago Negrón said “this inaction has to do with how comfortable the González Colón regime feels with the current situation of the country,” while Rep. Dennis Márquez Lebrón said of the governing New Progressive Party (NPP): “I believe that the vice of the supermajority also has them trapped.”
“In terms of the fact that we are the majority,” Márquez Lebrón said in reference to the NPP majority in the lower chamber, “we decide what is going to be done, we do not need anyone, and therefore, they do nothing either. The House of Representatives compared to either of the two previous four-year terms -- and [make no mistake] that the previous House had serious problems with legislative work, in terms of projection and workload -- but this is, really the word is, pathetic.”
“In other words, we are talking about almost a partial closure where, for example, tomorrow there is a legislative session and beyond some bills that are recycled from the previous four-year term, which are not even brought to public hearing because they already have memorials, there is no approval of anything fundamental by them,” Márquez Lebrón said.
“Unfortunately for this country,” he added, “eight years ago, at this date, they had already approved the Labor Reform, which destroyed the working class, and they had created the DSP [Department of Public Safety], which nobody believed in, but they created it. They had done everything bad. Now, they do not do everything bad and they are so bad that they cannot act legislatively with coherence and with legislative work.”
Separately, Popular Democratic Party (PDP) Secretary General Manuel Calderón Cerame described González Colón’s administration as getting off to “the worst start.”
“We are facing the worst start of a government in our history and this is evidenced by data on the inaction of this administration in its first two months,” he said at another press conference. “The result of the government’s management is zero laws signed. This, in addition to having a devastating record compared to past governments, is evidence that the governor and her team were not prepared to lead the country.”
Calderón Cerame noted that as of March 9 in the past five four-year terms, the breakdown of signed laws is: Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, two laws with a shared government: Luis Fortuño, nine laws, Alejandro García Padilla, three laws signed; Ricardo Rosselló, 16 laws signed, Pedro Pierluisi zero laws approved with a shared government; and González Colón, with zero laws approved and with a clear legislative majority.