Committee of the hole

Philippine Daily Inquirer

WE DO NOT KNOW WHETHER SEN. MANNY Villar has kept his own counsel on the C-5 issue, or whether his closest allies have been dispensing bad advice, but for a man who has stoutly protested his innocence, he is certainly acting guilty.

Except for unburdening himself in one angry privilege speech many months ago, he has essentially refused to take part in the Senate proceedings investigating the allegations thrown by Senators Ping Lacson and Jamby Madrigal that he had abused his position to make an unconscionable profit in a land-and-public-works deal at the government’s expense.

He had one plausible excuse for boycotting the proceedings: As his allies led by Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel Jr. argued before the Supreme Court, the Senate investigation—conducted not by the ethics committee but by the Senate itself, convened as a committee of the whole—was in fact a done, dastardly, deed. Their petition read, in part: “the rules adopted by the majority of the Senate committee of the whole clearly show utter disregard of such rules in favor of the hanging rope of a lynch mob.” In other words, the investigation was political.

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