Senator Enrile versus Speaker JDV

The feisty Senator Juan Ponce Enrile, in a verbal communication last week at the Senate, bare how the speaker invited him to, in so numerous remarks, pull back in commencing the inquiry of the northern railway project. Meeting Enrile at Makati’s Intercontinental Hotel, De Venecia even called up quite a few people to support his claim —as if he understood that Enrile would be influenced toward dropping the Northrail investigation on the simple endorsement of De Venecia’s clandestine co- schemers.

Enrile, the former Defense Minister during Marcos regime said he feel some pattern in De Venecia’s actions. The speaker likes holding silent conferences to strike out the arrangements that he is pushing, transactions that would essentially be better off dissected in an open venue as they ought to be. The hot NBN-ZTE broadband deal, as Enrile assumed was one of those inaudibly prepared contract and contemptibly unfavorable deals, pushed by the Speaker that would profit his own son.

At the moment Enrile is challenging De Venecia to a open debate on Northrail and other transactions that the senator considers the speaker formulated in the hushed of his domicile and in other such locations, for his own or his family members’ advantage. It doesn’t matter where, Enrile declares, provided that De Venecia is ready to leave the backrooms where he operates best and engages the senator in a public verbal tussle. As an extra inducement Enrile articulates there’s a bundle more other details about the speaker that he’s raring to expose, that is if De Venecia is game. As we all know the speaker, JDV most likely will not engage Enrile in any kind of arguments or discussions. The senator is excessively proficient an interrogator, too over matched to the speaker’s astuteness and veiled threats and too knowledgeable in De Venecia’s prior and recent dealings to be beaten.

This renders Enrile a dangerous core to break for the speaker: here is an antagonist that cannot be bought off with House bonuses, the menace of impeachment or even an accounting of stinking carcasses in the closet. In contrast, people who have recognized Enrile for a long moment believe that the aggressive senator from Cagayan has only launched his battle against the House speaker. Take note to the senator’s variety words for De Venecia’s contemporary transformation to near-complete derision as a “moral activist”. “What have you done for the betterment of our nation Mr. Speaker? You chatter on the subject of morality; you are not even at liberty to have a discussion about probity in government. Let the struggle carry on so that De Venecia and other cloaked wheeler-dealers similar to him will be unmasked and so that their shady transactions are hauled into the clear light of day''.