Senator-elect Leila de Lima. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO/Jilson Seckler Tiu
“We were not elected by the people just to be a rubber-stamp Congress.”
This was how Senator-elect Leila De Lima reacted on Friday to President-elect Rodrigo Duterte’s reported warning to lawmakers against stopping his fight against drugs and criminality by conducting investigations.
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Such pronouncements, if indeed true, “are designed to send a chilling effect to Congress,” De Lima said.
“The concept of checks and balances is seemingly lost on the President-elect. With that statement, if true and correct (i.e., he was not misquoted), what we expect now from his administration is intolerance to any form or measure of checks to possible abuses of the incoming administration,” De Lima said in a text message.
Despite these “threats of suppressing senators and congressmen who dare investigate government abuses,” De Lima said she was confident that Congress would continue to fulfill its mandate “as the people’s last guarantee against a possible tyranny of the executive branch.”
“Just to be very clear. Like many others, I am also an advocate, a strong one, of the fight against crime and corruption. I dont think any of us who will be sitting in the Senate and the House will unnecessarily hamper law enforcement just for the sake of conducting investigations,” she said.
“But when this so-called all-out war against crime is conducted without regard to the rule of law and human rights, then I think it would be an abdication of our mandate if we keep our eyes closed to abuses in the name of fighting criminality. We were not elected by the people just to be a rubber-stamp Congress,” she further said.
De Lima headed the Department of Justice before she was elected senator in the May 9 elections. CDG/rga
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