Self-destruction
What a difference a year makes. At this time in 2012, in the wake of then Chief Justice Renato Corona’s conviction on impeachment charges, one man stood out as the biggest victor in that prime-time political brawl.
No, not President Benigno Aquino, who—while accomplishing his stated objective of ridding the high court of someone he perceived as in thrall to his predecessor, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo—still had to labor under the considerable suspicion that he had vested interests in going after the nation’s highest magistrate, notably because of the Hacienda Luisita case.
The man spoken of with admiration was then Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, who amazed even those with a dim view of him given his controversial past, by presiding over the impeachment trial with a sharpness, perspicacity and sheer physical drive that belied his advanced years. His performance, deemed a veritable master class on the law and its finer points, dazzled many, and helped greatly in restoring him to the public approbation he had not enjoyed since his break from the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the heady days of the 1986 Edsa Revolution.
Many thought it was his way of compensating for his unsavory history not only as Marcos’ martial law administrator but also as a widely perceived coconspirator in many a coup attempt launched against the fledgling administration of Corazon Aquino. Later, during the so-called “Edsa Tres,” TV cameras caught him and another senator of the realm rousing the rabble to attack Malacañang, and then making themselves scarce as soon as the ragtag mass they had whipped into a frenzy petered out before the gates of the Palace.
Then again, now on his last term as senator and mindful of his place in history, surely Enrile’s consummate turn at the impeachment trial was his way of bowing out in a blaze of glory? An attempt perhaps to be remembered more for the good things he has done than for the bad?
Well, not exactly. Those who marvel at what a remarkable political survivor Enrile is often forget the flip side of the story: He has to resurrect himself time and time again because of his corollary tendency to self-destruct. It was so with Edsa and the coup attempts thereafter, or with his record as a brilliant senator forever marked by the “dagdag-bawas” that Aquilino Pimentel Jr. surely remembers to this day.
And so it was, too, with the goodwill he earned from the Corona impeachment trial frittered away just as swiftly. In quick succession, unmindful of his lofty position, the then Senate President engaged in ugly tussles with some of his colleagues in the chamber. Sen. Antonio Trillanes was no match to his older colleague’s ability to play hardball; Enrile appeared to have no qualms jeopardizing national security by revealing confidential diplomatic reports on the flash-point Spratlys issue on the Senate floor, just to put the tyro in his place. Against Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano, Enrile’s rhetoric reached truly unseemly levels in the course of dragging into the public domain his personal issues with Cayetano’s long-dead father (his former law partner and colleague in the Senate). Presented the opportunity to take the high road in the scandalous case of Sen. Tito Sotto, who brought disrepute to the Senate and the country when it was found that he had plagiarized foreign sources for his parliamentary diatribes against the reproductive health bill, Enrile sided with his ally. And when Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago protested the cash gifts he had distributed to favored senators, Enrile’s response was to dismiss the taxpayer-funded largesse as mere “balato.”
Enrile recently announced his irrevocable resignation as Senate President. He called it “a matter of personal honor and dignity,” but it came across as an empty gesture, a way to save face and preempt the inevitable, with the numbers not on his side in the incoming Senate. In a speech, he railed against, among others, those who he said doomed his son Jack’s senatorial candidacy by continually casting aspersions at him, the father—an admission, if nothing else, that the son ran on not much more than the second-hand sheen of his father’s name. What a sad, small way to go.
