When cornered, walk out. That’s just how the Terrible Two in the Senate roll.
The other night, deep into the 12-hour hearing by the Senate committee of justice and human rights on so-called extrajudicial killings, Leila de Lima one-upped Antonio Trillanes, her fellow traveler on the Yellow brick road, in their personal battle for the walkout record. The score is now De Lima 2, Trillanes 1.
Earlier, both were tied with Rene Saguisag, the original walkout king of the Senate, who pulled off the stunt way back in August 1987. Saguisag stepped out of the Senate so long ago that I doubt if even he remembers why he staged his footloose protest—if he remembers the incident at all.
Because Saguisag is no longer a senator, he can’t add to his walkout tally anymore. But four years ago, during the Corona impeachment hearings, Saguisag got close enough to Senate to accuse the embattled chief justice of walking out of his own trial, prompting the old former lawmaker to spout a famous line from Cicero’s Catiline Orations in the original Latin; maybe Rene’s memory isn’t as bad as I think.
As for De Lima’s tag-team, riding-in-tandem partner, Trillanes, he voted with his feet during a plenary session on Sept. 19, 2012, while Senator Juan Ponce Enrile was grilling him on the junior senator’s role as an unauthorized negotiator with the Chinese government. Enrile called Trillanes “the Phantom of the Opera of Philippine politics” because of the latter’s ninja-like moves to install himself as a backdoor channel after his boss, Noynoy Aquino, decided he was no longer talking to the Chinese—for personal profit, not out of patriotism, Enrile said.
Enrile, using notes made by Ambassador to Beijing Sonia Brady, accused Trillanes of bad-mouthing Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario and of nominating Interior Secretary Mar Roxas to head up the foreign affairs department. Trillanes just up and left the session hall, probably because he was scared that if he didn’t, Enrile would summon a police officer to drag him out by his waistband, reprising that famous photo of him after he “laid siege” to the well-stocked buffet tables at the Manila Peninsula hotel.
As for De Lima, she first got high on walking out of the Senate in the middle of a recent privilege speech by her and Trillanes’ self-appointed nemesis in the chamber, Alan Peter Cayetano. The camera caught De Lima briefly conferring with her alleged mentor in the Senate, Franklin Drilon, before gathering up her things and slowly, dramatically walking behind Cayetano—who didn’t even skip a beat while delivering his own anti-De Lima tirade from the podium.
As Saguisag (or Cicero, I forget which) would say: Quo usque tandem abutere, Leila de Lima, patientia nostra?
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The second Leila walkout episode last Monday night was precipitated by her anger at the senator who replaced her as justice committee chairman, Richard “Dick” Gordon. Dick and his co-chairman Panfilo Lacson took De Lima and Trillanes to task for a) failing to disclose that their star witness, Edgar Matobato, had been charged with kidnapping a Turkish national and had filed a counter-affidavit, and b) allowing Matobato to leave the Senate despite Gordon’s order for him to stick around, because the policemen he had accused of horrible crimes were at the session hall to refute his allegations.
De Lima, by my count, threatened to walk out three times before actually doing so, as if she thought she could convince Gordon and Lacson to stop being such hard-asses if they wanted her to continue to honor them with her presence. But Gordon responded like they do on Magsaysay Boulevard to Trillanes’ call for him to apologize to De Lima: “Not in your lifetime, boy!”; so Leila walked out again, for the second time since she became a senator.
But what was the fuss all about, really? Gordon and Lacson were aghast that De Lima and Trillanes, Matobato’s co-managers, did not disclose that the witness had been charged before a prosecutor for kidnapping and had already submitted an affidavit in his defense.
In his affidavit, which only Matobato and his Senate handlers knew about, the witness never said the Davao City police and/or Davao Death Squad helped him kidnap Sali Makdum, the Turkish “international terrorist.” He only pointed to men “in military uniforms” as the kidnappers, not cops.
This was what Gordon and Lacson meant when they said Matobato and the two other senators were guilty of “material concealment.” If the three had informed the committee that Matobato had already issued a sworn statement that was very much different from his Senate testimony, the policemen who went to Manila from Davao (at their own expense, I’m told) to rebut his claims would never have been summoned.
As for Trillanes hiding from the committee that he had told Matobato to leave “for security reasons,” that’s just a lot of cow manure, according to Dick and Ping. My own theory is that Trillanes was just hiding Matobato from the Davao cops against whom he made such wild accusations, in the same way that he escaped from the Senate to avoid Enrile’s questions about selling Panatag Shoal to the Chinese.
Walking is good for your health, they say. And what I really want is for De Lima and Trillanes to walk out of the Senate for good and for the good of the nation, taking their clueless flunky Matobato with them.
Ave atque vale, as Rene would say. And stay out.