By
‘SHAMEFUL’ does not begin to describe the behavior of most senators during last week’s sham hearing on the administration’s Disbursement Acceleration Program.
The Senate finance committee had called the hearing purportedly to grill government officials on serious allegations that public funds had been misappropriated through the DAP, parts of which the Supreme Court has already declared as unconstitutional.
What followed instead was a seven-hour defense of the program, led by none other than the senators themselves.
With Senate President Franklin Drilon and Senator Antonio Trillanes IV leading the way, President Aquino’s allies took turns posing leading questions that allowed Budget Secretary Florencio Abad to sing praises to the discredited program.
Drilon also used the opportunity to smear administration critics by getting Abad to testify that they, too, received funding from the DAP—without saying that the lawmakers eventually canceled their projects and returned the funding when they realized how legally untenable the program was.
Trillanes, alternately licking the President’s boots and waving pom-poms, even urged Abad to push the Palace communications group to spread the word more aggressively that the DAP was both legal and good for the country.
The administration senators bleated the administration line—again and again—that contrary to the Supreme Court’s ruling, the unconstitutional transfer of funds was not illegal, and that nobody should be called to account simply because they acted with good intentions.
At the hearing, most of the senators also seemed to accept without question the administration mantra that the DAP had an immediate beneficial impact on the economy, even though Palace documents show that funding for the rehabilitation of airports and seaports—worth about P14.5 billion over two years--had been impounded in favor of projects such as stem cell research, the rehabilitation of Malacañang Palace and a capital infusion for the central bank, none of which had been approved by Congress.
Even though seven groups had successfully challenged the DAP before the Supreme Court, the chairman of the finance committee, Senator Francis Escudero, had not invited a single one to the hearing to challenge the government claims.
Questioned about how his hearing had been transformed into a televised propaganda exercise for the DAP, Escudero merely shrugged off the criticism, saying nobody could control what individual senators said.
The hearing, in truth, was painful to watch. Given the contempt that the senators showed last week for our intelligence, it was fortunate that there was no on-screen sign language interpreter during the seven-hour, televised hearing. An honest interpreter would have been frozen in one pose--giving the nation a one-finger salute.
No comments:
Post a Comment