The Blue Ribbon’s credibility evaporated with Lacson as chairman

BY any standard of law and morality, Sen. Panfilo “Ping” Lacson should never have accepted the post of chairman of the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee in the first place.

His Sept. 7 Facebook post, in which he declared, “Mr. President, we have your back,” was a confession of servility to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Lacson’s post was nauseating as it was made by a senator who the very next day would be named chairman of the Blue Ribbon Committee that is in the middle of investigating the biggest case of corruption in our modern history — which cannot exclude Marcos as a suspect. The committee — headed by opposition senator Rodante Marcoleta — had held just two hearings and Marcos removes him and replaces him with Lacson. Lacson even became a propagandist — a poor one — for the president, his post showing Marcos’ picture supposedly crying in anger over the discovered ghost flood control projects. Lacson melodramatically wrote:

“We feel you, Mr. President. You have given me and my team the firm resolve to do our part in exposing, even compiling solid evidence to nail these ‘greedy flood control profiteers’ and their cohorts both in the public and private sectors. We have your back sir. (Emphasis in the original.)”

Has dementia hit Lacson that he forgets he is a senator of the Republic? Was he confused, perhaps thinking that he was still the Philippine National Police chief addressing President Estrada?

That single line destroyed the moral spine of the Blue Ribbon Committee. It was not just unbecoming — it was disqualifying. If he was lucid, Lacson obviously wanted to endear himself to the president. “I’m your man for 2028,” was apparently his message.

At least this Lacson episode has confirmed to us that all these allegations over the ghost flood control scam and the hijacking of the budget from 2022 to 2025 siphoned into the bank accounts of the main players in this administration are indeed true, and could lead to the toppling of this administration by an outraged nation.

Marcos

Why else would Marcos spend so much political (and I dare say, perhaps even financial) capital to put his man as Senate president, who would appoint as Blue Ribbon Committee chairman someone who professed to be his political bodyguard in the Blue Ribbon investigations?

Former senator and Senate president Franklin Drilon, in a TV interview, claimed Lacson’s sacking was a “king’s gambit,” a metaphor for a chess move strategy in which a valuable piece is sacrificed to the opponent to gain an advantageous position. In this case the removal of Lacson is intended to salvage the Blue Ribbon Committee’s credibility, to ultimately clear Marcos and his cousin, former speaker Martin Romualdez, of any culpability.

It may or it may not. The context however is that Lacson’s removal is, in effect, Strike 2 that has damaged Marcos’ entire cover-up efforts to prosecute those involved in the flood control scam, while clearing him of the slightest responsibility for it. Strike 1 was Baguio Mayor Benjie Magalong’s resignation as advisor to Marcos’ creation, the Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI), after just 11 days there, vaguely claiming he doubted its independence.

With reports that the ICI has received only token amounts of funds for its operation as well as little staffing, rumors have been swirling that former DPWH head Rogelio Singson — a much-respected and highly paid corporate executive — will be the next to resign. This would be “Strike 3” that would be a slippery slope for the ICI’s total loss of credibility.

The talk is that all three ICI members — Singson the corporate executive, the retired Supreme Court justice, the accounting firm head — have realized that their skills set does not match the job requirement, which almost entirely really consists of police fraud investigation, interrogation of suspects, and filing of legally tight court cases.

What has created a ton of suspicion that Lacson indeed has “Marcos’ (and therefore his cousin Romualdez’s) backs” is his facile rejection of Marcoleta’s motion to invite Romualdez and Go to the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee hearings on the burning issue. Lacson dismissed the request in one sentence: “It goes against traditional inter-parliamentary courtesy.” At the very least, Lacson should have allowed the senators to air their views, and then call for a vote. He didn’t.

Preposterous

Lacson’s is a preposterous excuse. The idea of “inter-parliamentary courtesy” — the presumed ban on one chamber’s questioning of a member of the other chamber — is not in any rule book of the Senate and the House. The House won’t raise a ruckus over the violation of “courtesy” when what’s at stake is to arrive at the truth of, among others, whether the former head of the House and his closest minion, with the president’s approval, were responsible for the biggest case of corruption in the country’s history.

How can inter-parliamentary courtesy be invoked after the speaker of the House of Representatives threw into the rubbish bin the Senate’s constitutionally given authority to approve each and every item in the General Appropriations Bill, and instead added an estimated P1.4 trillion solely at the speaker’s behest, a huge amount equivalent to at the very least 5 percent of the budget for those years under Marcos?

Disregarding that “interparliamentary courtesy” could be argued as complying with the legal principle of nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege, which roughly means: No written law, no crime. Lacson could just have told the House: “Sue us.”

Lacson’s parliamentary courtesy in all likelihood has allowed billions of dirty money to be moved out of country, with Zaldy Co already abroad for a month now.

The 15 senators who voted in Vicente “Tito” Sotto III to replace Francis “Chiz” Escudero most probably each had their own reasons for doing so, but all were aware that at the end of the day, it was Marcos’ wish. Only after government-held witnesses claimed that other than Escudero, two of them — Senators Jinggoy Estrada and Joel Villanueva — also received graft money from these flood control scams that they left this “Marcos majority.” Several others though have been reported to be planning to leave the majority, incensed over Lacson’s tactless statement that nearly all senators in the 19th Congress made insertions in Marcos’ budgets.

Defections

What we can definitely classify as the group that is not made up of Marcos’ servants, and therefore will pursue with determination the investigation on the budget and ghost-project corruption, has increased by two to make up a nine-senator minority: Alan Peter Cayetano, Chiz Escudero, Joel Villanueva, Bong Go, Rodante Marcoleta, Imee Marcos, Robin Padilla, Jinggoy Estrada and Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa.

The Marcos majority’s hold has been reduced to 15 which includes the shameless three Yellow senators Risa Hontiveros, Kiko Pangilinan and Bam Aquino, as well as Tito Sotto, Migz Zubiri, Ping Lacson, JV Ejercito, Loren Legarda, Sherwin Gatchalian, Raffy and Erwin Tulfo, Mark and Camille Villar, Pia Cayetano, and Lito Lapid.

The drastic drop in Marcos’ political support due to the revelations of massive corruption will result in more defections — by the Yellow 3 nagged by their Yellow comrades, the Villars and Gatchalian to send the message of a worried big business, the Tulfos who follow the direction of political winds. By the end of the year, Marcos will be losing his hold on the Senate. That would create, or add to, the momentum to remove him from his post even before his term ends.

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The Blue Ribbon’s credibility evaporated with Lacson as chairman
Source: Breaking News PH