MANILA, Philippines — More than finding faults, the new Senate leadership will focus on helping solve the country’s pressing problems while still maintaining the chamber’s independence, newly installed Senate President Juan Miguel Zubiri vowed on Monday.
Now at the helm of the Senate, Zubiri recognized the “multiple crises” that need to be addressed such as food, fuel, and fiscal problems, and “the fading faith of our people in our institutions.”
“This Senate will meet these big problems with bold thinking, and brave legislation, but most especially, and I am looking forward to this, bipartisanship,” he said after his election as Senate president.
READ: Zubiri is new Senate President
“In this Senate workshop of great ideas, laws will be forged, and from which, oversight of those who implement or ignore the laws will also be conducted,” he also said.
FILE PHOTO: New Senate President Juan Miguel “Migz” F. Zubiri. (Joseph Vidal/Senate PRIB)
According to Zubiri, the Senate will exercise its oversight “not because we want to encroach on the executive branch or emasculate it of its powers.”
“We do so in order to help the government – the presidency even – remedy deficiencies in the delivery of public services and recalibrate ineffective policies,” he pointed out.
“This Senate, under my leadership, however, will be one to solve problems more than it would find faults,” he likewise stressed.
Zubiri further said that “while probes are magnets for publicity,” it is the policies that drive progress.
“But for us to do our role, we must uphold the Senate’s proud tradition of being independent,” he said.
“And that is important because the Senate’s independence is the lynchpin of its two other hallmarks: industry and innovation,” he added.
To the opposition, Zubiri recalled what he learned when he was in the minority: “It is that the strength of an idea is what makes it right and not the sheer number of its believers.”
“Let us debate and embrace ideas without regard [for] where they come from,” he continued.
Other ranking officials of the Senate elected at Monday’s opening of the 19th Congress are Senate President Pro Tempore Loren Legarda, Senate committee on rules chairman and concurrent Majority Floor Leader Joel Villanueva, and Senate Secretary Renato Bantug.
READ: Senate elects new key leaders; Koko Pimentel ‘designated’ Minority Leader
Meanwhile, Senator Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III was designated as the Minority Leader.