Too hot to handle?
The latest word is that the Senate blue ribbon committee report on its investigation into anomalous flood control projects will be revised. No longer will the final draft recommend that charges be filed against some incumbent senators linked to the irregularities, only that they “undergo preliminary investigation.”
A strategic retreat or a craven loss of nerve? The panel chair, Senate President Pro Tempore Panfilo “Ping” Lacson, is framing it as the former. “The version may change, but not the substance,” he insisted.
“The connotation, for example, in the draft that was initially routed, there was a word there: ‘charged’ … To a layman, it sounds like the person is already in court. So we specified that instead of using the word … it should say ‘to undergo preliminary investigation,’ ‘to undergo fact-finding investigation,’ or ‘to undergo case buildup,’” he added.
Noncommittal alternative
Lacson said the change in language was not to mollify his cosenators named in the report, or to shore up the leadership of Senate President Vicente “Tito” Sotto III, who had just survived an attempt to unseat him by the minority bloc that counts Estrada, Villanueva, and Escudero as members.
In fact, it was the majority bloc, said Lacson, who “suggested that maybe the language could be softened without sacrificing the intent or changing the substance.”
Lacson may contort himself into knots trying to justify the changes in his committee report, but the toothpaste is out of its tube, so to speak. Because of the leaked draft, the public already knows that, in an original moment of clarity—and perhaps moral courage?—the Senate committee had been prepared just days earlier to state that actual wrongdoing was committed by some senators, and call for charges to be pursued against them in court.
Compare that now to the lame, noncommittal alternative of calling only for a “preliminary investigation” against them. That move effectively means the supposedly fearsome blue ribbon panel is abstaining from judgment on the very evidence it was able to gather across a number of hearings, and leaving it to other government agencies to formalize the findings of misconduct.
‘Old boys’ club’
The accusations against Estrada, Villanueva, and Escudero stand on strong ground. They were directly implicated in sworn testimonies by former Department of Public Works and Highways Undersecretary Roberto Bernardo and former Bulacan district engineer Henry Alcantara. The witnesses had dates, receipts, and numbers to back up their claims.
Bernardo’s testimony, in particular, has already led to the arrest and detention of a number of individuals, including Revilla, who faces charges of malversation of public funds through falsification of public documents at the Sandiganbayan.
To hear now that the language of the committee report has been finessed to water down the findings of culpability by these senators is to suspect that the Senate’s “old boys’ club” system is once again at work. The lawmakers are circling the wagons and protecting their own kind from any serious threat of accountability, and any protestations of the report’s intent still being “intact” only brings to high relief the horse-trading and accommodations likely done behind closed doors to defang the report.
Anticlimactic
Remulla assured that, whatever the final form of the blue ribbon report, the witnesses’ testimonies and other records will suffice for robust and proper case buildup. “The report is really anticlimactic. We already know what happened ahead of the report,” he said.
Since the Senate appears to be shrinking from taking a firm stand on something it finds too hot to handle, the Ombudsman must take up the slack and expedite the work of pursuing accountability against the senators and other powerful, well-placed individuals linked to the scandal.
The public is angry and impatient. The Marcos administration has become vulnerable to charges of inaction and weakness precisely because it appears to be moving too slowly, and too selectively, in taking action against the biggest suspects in this massive corruption scheme.
The Senate blue ribbon panel’s decision to tamp down its conclusions against fellow senators is of a piece with this entitled, compromised system of justice. It’s just “politics,” indeed, but of the shabby, self-preserving kind that further erodes public trust.
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