TWO senators on Sunday assailed defeated vice presidential candidate Senator Alan Peter Cayetano for his alleged desperate attempt to grab the Senate presidency from incoming Senate President Aquilino Pimentel III.
Senators Panfilo Lacson and Vicente Sotto III, however, stressed that Pimentel would be the Senate president of the 17th Congress.
“No amount of intrigues and self-serving statements coming from him or anybody can alter what the majority of the 17th Congress consider as sealed and delivered Senate presidency to Pimentel,” Lacson said.
Lacson was among those who joined the so-called Supermajority in the coming 17th Congress and rallied behind Pimentel’s leadership of the Senate.
Sotto has said Pimentel will be the Senate president and he will be the majority leader replacing Cayetano in the next Congress.
Pimentel is the president of PDP-Laban, which is led by Duterte. The outgoing Davao City mayor was adopted by PDP-Laban when he ran for president in the May 9 elections.
Cayetano, who has been pushing himself to replace incumbent Senate President Franklin Drilon, belongs to the Nacionalista Party.
Cayetano has rebuked his colleagues in the Senate for opting for the status quo instead of change when they declared Pimentel as the next Senate president.
In an earlier interview in Davao City, Cayetano said his offer to run for Senate president was conditioned on the fact that “we will have a majority that will be supportive of the mandate of the president.”
Lacson strongly reacted to the pronouncements of Cayetano, saying he was not at all against Duterte.
“I’m not at all against President-elect Duterte as averred by Senator Cayetano,” Lacson said.
“In fact, I continue to believe that the [outgoing] mayor can really make a difference in reducing crime and corruption in our country.
I merely commented on his statement undermining the integrity and independence of the Senate because I felt it was my obligation to do so.”
“If i say it will pass, it will pass,” said Sotto who insisted the Supermajority would be supportive of Duterte’s agenda while maintaining its independence.
Drilon, the first to break the news that the majority of the senators had opted to support Pimentel, said the coming Senate would not be a “rubber stamp” of the Duterte administration. He said it would be cooperative but not subservient.
Sotto had earlier said some of their colleagues had scored Cayetano over his plan to make the Senate presidency a “parking slot,” where he would spend his time while waiting for the lapse of the one-year ban on losing candidates to occupy a government post.
Cayetano, a lawyer, has been offered by Duterte to choose between sitting as secretary of the Department of Justice or the Department of Foreign Affairs.