ILLOGICAL, IMMORAL, ILLEGAL

Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile has been quoted in the news as challenging Sen. Sen. Miriam Defensor Santiago to sue him in all courts of law and he will defend the legality of the "cash gift and bonuses" he gave to Senators toward the end of last year. There is reason to believe that, being a seasoned lawyer in his own right, the Senate President may have convinced many that what he did may not be exactly moral but it was perfectly legal.  That may be why Dante Jimenez of the Volunteer Against Crime and Corruption is filing only an ethics complaints with the Senate, rather than, for example, a graft case with the Ombudsman.

I am certainly not a lawyer to argue with those who are.  But for me, for any act to be legal, it must first and foremost be logical (acceptable to plain common sense) and moral (acceptable to one's conscience).  In turn, ethics --  the human discipline dealing with what is right or wrong -- must conform with the requirements of  logic, morality and the law. Necessarily in that order, I suppose.  Now, let us analyze the circumstances surrounding the much ballyhooed budget realignments made by Enrile.

It is the prime responsibility of any department head, be it in public or private organizations, to consciously manage his department's budget with the end in view, as much as permissible, of  balancing the revenues and expenses to avoid a deficit.  A deficit happens when expenses overshot revenues; if it is the other.around, there is savings.  And savings, plain common sense dictate, must revert to treasury at the end of the year when the current year's budget is cload and a new budget is prepared.  Unfortunately, that was not what happened.   Enrile had instead realigned the savings and appropriate it essentially as senators' cash gifts and bonuses.  Worse, a large part of the savings is reported as having come from the unspent salary of ex-Senator, now President Aquino most probably from July 2010 up to December 2012.  That Aquino's salary as Senator continued to be included in the Senate budget (even if it ws too well known it would not be spent as such)  as well of course as in the Executive department's budget, is not only erroneous "double handling," as accountants call it; it also borders on "mental dishonesty."   And that the so-called "savings" is people's money, for all intents and purposes, not Enrile's, but Enrile gave them away as his personal "gifts and bonuses" to the Senators, is clearly marked by extreme imperviousness to impressions and ideas that human society regards as morally acceptable.

Now the legality.  True, the Constitution provides that the Senate President is among several high-ranking heads of government authorized to augment any item in the general appropriations law for their respective offices from savings in other items of their respective appropriations.  But the charter did not stop at that.  It added: "Discretionary funds appropriated for particular offices shall be disbursed only for public purposes to be supported by appropriate vouchers and subject to such guidelines as may be prescribed by law.  And so the curious question aches for an equally curious answer: "Are personal gifts and bonuses to Senators for public purposes.

At the very least, methinks the Senate President has abused his discretionary authority in this regard.