DESPITE joining the “Supermajority” to support the legislative agenda of President-elect Rodrigo Duterte, Senators Panfilo Lacson and Leila De Lima said Friday the Senate will not be a rubber stamp of the incoming Duterte administration.
Lacson said the President could not stand in the way of their mandated duty.
“We will exercise our subpoena powers not to mention the power to cite for contempt any person who defies our authority under the Constitution,” Lacson, an independent candidate who joined the Liberal Party in the May 9 elections, said in a text message.
He made his message even as Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno said the Supreme Court had been doing its job to rid its ranks of rotten eggs and would continue to do so.
Sereno made her statement following Duterte’s criticism of judges selling temporary restraining orders.
She said that while the high court was aware of the corruption problem in the judiciary, it “has been unrelenting” in cracking the whip on erring judges, court employees and lawyers.
De Lima said they were not elected by the people just to be a rubber-stamp Congress.
She was reacting to Duterte’s warning to lawmakers against stopping his fight against drugs and criminality by conducting congressional investigations.
Duterte had reportedly told some congressmen, including incoming Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez, not to make the mistake of conducting a congressional inquiry on his anti-crime campaign once it got off the ground.
“Don’t investigate me. The road will end with me. The buck stops here,” Duterte said.
“We are going to have a fight. I am doing what is right as long as it is the truth.”
But De Lima said if such pronouncements were indeed true, they were designed to send a chilling effect to Congress.
She stressed that the concept of checks and balances was seemingly lost on the President-elect.
“With that statement, if true and correct, what we expect now from his administration is intolerance to any form or measure of checks to possible abuses of the incoming administration,” said De Lima who quit as Justice secretary to join the senatorial race and won eventually.
Lacson said Congress, particularly the Senate, was not like most of the provincial, city or municipal councils.
“We will conduct investigations in aid of legislation whenever necessary, and nobody, not even the President of the Republic, can dictate and stop us from doing our job,” he said.
Outgoing Senate President Franklin Drilon and his successor, Senator Aquilino Pimentel III, had assured them that the Senate would be independent, although 17 out of the 24 senators will be members of the emerging majority when the 17th Congress opens on July 25.