MY APOLOGY

Oh, how the media sometimes tend to confuse the readers! Or, was it rather my own perception that leaves  much to be desired?  At any rate, I have just learned a good lesson to henceforth keep in mind in writing my future blogs.

I am referring to my earlier blog, titled: "Illogical, Immoral, Illegal," describing Sen. President Juan Ponce Enrile's much ballyhooed "cash gifts and bonuses" to senators.  After listening to Enrile's TV interview with Mareng Winnie Monsod in GMA7's "Bawal and Pasaway" I must apologize for what I said.  After all, and I am convinced by Enrile's explanation, such "cash gifts and bonuses"  were really never intended for the senators' personal pockets.  Rather, Enrile had covered each one of those fund transfers to the senators' accounts with  an individual check, purposely  for each check to formally serve as a receipt or acknowledgement that each senator had been entrusted with money belonging to the people, in turn for their respective liquidation via vouchers covering  purely public purposes.  Of course, Sen. Allan Peter Cayetano was questioning, rightly at that,  why the liquidation was only through a so-called "certification."   But while such certification can not but reflect a semblance of "anomaly,"  it seems to me the weight of the anomaly eventually falls not as much on Enrile as upon  the senators themselves, not one of whom, quite suspiciously, had ever complained in the past even if they had known all about the undesirable practice since time immemorial   Sen. Angara was indeed correct in recently confirming that practice was time-honored.  And yes, Enrile may have been less prudent in allowing only a "certification" as liquidation -- if that is true, anyway --  but haven't  they, meaning the senators themselves acted more imprudently in conveniently not shouting against it much earlier.  And so I ask: isn't Cayetano suddenly raising heaven and hell about it only now because, along with three other senators, he got very much less than what all the other senators had received?

Note that Enrile had outright agreed to Cayetano's suggestion, subject to majority concurrence of the whole Senate, that a private auditing firm looked into the Senate's fund.  I am almost dead-sure the other senators would not support  that.  If they do, it is going to be their individual accounts that might reveal anomalies, not as much Enrile's, who did nothing but to apportion the Senate savings into the individual senators' respective budgets.  That discretionary authority is well sanctioned by the Constitution, whereas the Constitution requires that each senator covers all expenditures out of people's money under their custody by official receipts and vouchers indicating they are really for public purposes.

Indeed, it was so unfortunate that the word war between Enrile and Cayetano had brought the entire Senate into the gutter.  I tend to believe, nevertheless, that it was Cayetano, not Enrile, who first went into personal tirades against the other.  I don't think the Senate could yet rise up from the ugly gutter it had sunk into, before they adjourned for the mid-term elections.  Let's just wait and see who between Cayetano and Enrile's son, Jack, would be more negatively affected in the forthcoming senatorial polls.  Methinks that is everybody's wild guess.