126 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy suggest that the President should not be dominant relative to Congress and the Supreme Court in what used to be deemed as an exclusive Presidential power—proclamation of martial law and suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. Following this lead, the direction of the agenda for institutional reforms should be to strengthen Congress and the Supreme Court in order to check the vast powers of the President. The powers of the executive should be more effectively checked by the legislature. M. Steven Fish asserts that the strength of national legislature may be a—or even the—institutional key to democratization. Stronger legislatures served as the weightier check on Presidents and thus a more reliable guarantor of horizontal accountability than did weaker legislatures (M. Steven Fish in Diamond and Plattner 2009:20). Specifically, these agenda for institutional reforms includes pushing for legislation that will restore Congress' power of the purse, improve the oversight function of Congress, enable the existing executive-legislative and executive-legislative-judicial collaboration as the core mechanisms for transparency and control of abuse of authority, and strengthen the fiscal independence of the judiciary. A significant initial step is to attempt to democratize public finance in the country by trying to restore Congress' power over the purse. The executive has encroached on this power during the authoritarian regime of Marcos through Presidential Decree 1177—Institutionalizing Budgetary Reforms (Boncodin 2008: Philippine Human Development Report 2008/2009). It provides for the automatic appropriation for the payment of the foreign debts incurred by the government of the Philippines. This automatic appropriation removes from the Congress the power to decide on the matter of payment for the country's foreign debt. This questionable provision of the Decree has been a bone of contention between Congress and Malacañang. At the start of the Aquino revolutionary government in 1986, the President decided to honor the foreign debts incurred by Marcos. The automatic appropriation provided for in the decree was adopted. The alternative policy of trying to negotiate for a condonation of the debts with foreign governments, international financial institutions and multinational banks was shelved. Hence, the budget process established during martial law persisted, and reinforced the authoritarian mindset of the executive and legislators as regards public finance. Senator Aquilino Pimentel petitioned the Supreme Court to declare Presidential Decree 1177 unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ruled that this is