Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile’s resignation as Senate President was a surprise even to his closest allies, Senators Jinggoy Estrada and Tito Sotto. The best thing in JPE’s privilege speech that day was not the resignation itself but his call for a transparent audit of Senate finances.
I simply cannot understand why columnist Conrado de Quiros keeps repeating the same tired arguments against resigned Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile (Opinion, “Arrogance,” 6/10/13).
Juan Ponce Enrile had some choice words for his tormentors last Wednesday.
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.
Juan Ponce Enrile irrevocably resigned the Senate presidency on Wednesday, ending close to five years of leadership of the reputedly more independent chamber of Congress.
In May 2002, I was served a warrant of arrest by RTC Quezon City Branch 100 for a case of libel filed against me by Juan Ponce Enrile and his son Jackie. The libel stemmed from statements I made in an interview with Paolo Bediones for his TV program “Extra Extra.”
First off, my monumental thanks to WikiLeaks, whose founder Julian Assange remains cooped up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, unable to set foot outside its gates. In a week’s time, it has given today’s generation a better glimpse of martial law than Juan Ponce Enrile’s not very entertaining fiction about it.
There’s no hard evidence to confirm it. But the growing perception is that at no other time in our nation’s political history have political families become more brazen in promoting their interests than in this year’s elections. One quickly notes this in the senatorial slates of the two dominant coalitions. The opposition United Nationalist Alliance (UNA) slate is led by the children of the three key figures who formed the coalition, namely the son of former President Joseph Estrada, the daughter of Vice President Jejomar Binay, and the son of Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile. The administration’s Team PNoy is not any different. Two-thirds of its 12 candidates belong to political families.
On grimy post office steps, flanked by cartons and plastic bottles, scavenger “Raul” prepared Sunday breakfast: green mangoes plus salt. “Kain tayo (Dine with me), sir,” he called when we passed to mail a letter.
Serge Osmeña and Sonny Belmonte are aghast. After Juan Ponce Enrile, comes now Roberto Ongpin revising history. In an interview with the Inquirer run during the 27th anniversary of Edsa, Ongpin felt emboldened enough to claim a couple of things. One was that Ferdinand Marcos and not Cory Aquino actually won the snap election, and two was that he actually did the Philippines a favor by putting up the so-called “Binondo Central Bank” after Ninoy Aquino was murdered and money began to fly out of the country.
The internecine feud between Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile and Senators Alan Peter Cayetano, Pia Cayetano, Miriam Defensor-Santiago and Antonio Trillanes has brought upon all of them a common scourge: a headache—a kind of headache that respects no medicine, making all the paracetamol tablets in the world pieces of junk. It is the type of headache that rankles the nerves and makes the diastolic reading soar like a rocket.
The country has a great deal to worry about when P1.6 million is given as a Christmas cash gift to each of 18 senators and another P250,000 each to four other senators while millions of Filipinos are starving and thousands of displaced typhoon victims are in dire need of food, shelter and clothing assistance from the government.
