Duterte to control legislature a la PNoy

Batas Mauricio

AT the rate newly elected congressmen and senators and their political parties are worming themselves up to President Rodrigo Duterte even before he starts his six-year presidency, it wouldn’t be difficult to imagine that the control that President Aquino exercised on the congressmen and senators who served with him from 2010 to 2016 would be similarly exercised by Duterte himself.

And so, in the same manner that the congressmen and senators from 2010 to 2016 served as rubber stamps of Aquino, in a manner far worse than the congressmen and senators who served as rubber stamps of former President Marcos during his 20-year reign, majority of the incoming lawmakers now would also be spineless rubber stamps of Duterte.

Many of them will deny this, but how will we explain the clear mass exodus of lawmakers and their parties towards the incoming President from Davao City? Hurrying to curry his favors, particularly on the matter of pork barrel, those who have allied with Duterte would just be too willing to do anything he desires or fancies, in much the same way that the lawmakers during Aquino’s time did anything he wanted them to do.

Indeed, it is a misnomer to call these lawmakers and their political parties “balimbings”, after the local fruit which is noted for its many sides. Filipino politicians nowadays do not actually have many sides. They only have one side, as it were, and that is their, and their family’s side.

They only have the interest of their political dynasties to uphold and protect, at all cost, including the cost of massive vote buying, just to ensure their victory at the polls. Their objective is to remain in political power, no matter how this is achieved, because it is only in remaining in their elected positions that they are able to further enrich themselves, earning in the process the money required to buy their votes in succeeding elections.

Consequently, they don’t really care about the leaders of the parties they supposedly belong to, whether those leaders win or not in their own political battles. If the leaders who are aspiring for important positions get elected, politicians will merely stick with them. If they lose, politicians will simply switch to the winning candidates.

That is the reason why I suspect that graft and corruption, crime and criminality, and proliferation of illegal gambling, illegal drugs, and smuggled products, will thrive even under a Duterte administration which was swept to power by a promise of wiping out all of these vices from government and from the country.

The fact is that, many (not all, really) politicians or the people from whom they owe their campaign funds, are themselves considered to be the grafters and the corrupt, the crime, drug, and gambling, lords and smugglers, in their localities, who have been untouchables under Aquino and the other presidents.

And from the looks of it, many of these slimes of society are already worming their way in, if they have not wormed their way in already, and appear in fact to be partying now with many of our incoming leaders. So, do we brace ourselves for another useless six-year presidency?

• •

It maybe because of the stress or the excitement of becoming our country’s leaders in the next six years, or of the rigors of the just concluded grueling and heavily bruising campaign, that the assistants of Duterte now appear to be warring or misunderstanding one another, in public yet.

So I say, let us give them time to rest for a while, and fully prepare for the grave work that lies ahead of them. Let us also try to understand that these assistants are all human beings, capable of getting angry at other people whom they perceive may have wronged them, or of making mistakes. They remain, after all, men and women filled with imperfections.

Be that as it may, here is an unsolicited advice to Duterte’s assistants: unless it is something constructive, it would be best to keep one’s mouth fully shut. As a sage once said, it is better to be silent and be considered as having something deep in one’s mind, rather than talk, or open one’s mouth, and be proved a fool.

Peter Tiu Lavina, the campaign spokesman of Duterte, let out quite a mouthful during the press conference he gave to mediamen who were camping out in Davao City last Friday which proved beyond reasonable doubt that all is not really well not only between him and Duterte’s other assistants, but between him and Duterte as well.

His first point: media should ask lawyer Salvador Panelo, not him (Lavina, that is) regarding the appointments of former Justice Undersecretary Jose Calida as the incoming solicitor general and of some other appointments allegedly made by Duterte. It showed that one, Lavina, is surprisingly not in the loop about these appointments, and two, that he is not seeing eye to eye with Panelo.

This lends some truth to the Facebook post of Joel Sy Maguiza Egco, the Malacanang reporter of the Manila Times, to the effect that Lavina and Duterte campaign manager Leoncio Evasco have left the Duterte camp now, because they are allegedly being left out in the cold by the other assistants of the incoming president, notably Panelo and longtime executive assistant Bong Go. True or false?

• •

My wife (former Judge Angelina Domingo Mauricio) and I filed two cases against the Department of Education, challenging its orders preventing the continued operation of elementary and secondary schools owned and operated by Christian churches across the country.

Two groups–the United Association of Christian Educators of the Philippines (Ascep) and the Association of Christian Teachers and Schools (Acts)–sought our help as lawyers, on the argument that Christian churches, or those belonging to the Born Again denomination, have biblical, constitutional, and statutory mandates to own and operate schools with the principal duty of teaching spirituality to children.

These Christian churches have been owning and operating schools for ages, and the DepEd already recognized their right to own and operate these schools, in the light of their good performance. Suddenly, apparently on the prodding of some powerful business groups, the DepEd turned around and is now persecuting the Christian schools. Work of the devil?

E-mail: batasmauricio@yahoo.com