Cayetano bares ‘offers’ to make him Senate President

While his colleagues were electing a new Senate leader on Monday, Senator  Alan Peter Cayetano was on social media exposing “offers” that “would have made (him) Senate President.”

“Two groups offered me a deal. Taking just one of the two offers would have made me Senate President,” Cayetano wrote on his Facebook wall. “Yet, somehow I was never tempted to take the deal,” he added in the post he titled “Losing What Was Never Mine; Keeping What’s Important to Me.”

According to him, he let go of the offers “because on May 7 2016, in Luneta, our historic miting de avance, I made a commitment … A commitment to help and protect our President.”

Cayetano said he chose to help President Rodrigo Duterte, “our God-given ‘Reset Button’, who would initiate revolutionary change in our country and liberate us from illegal drugs, crime and corruption/incompetence/apathy in government.”

He said accepting any of the two “deals” would have “ put the President and his agenda in jeopardy.”

“I thought long and hard about it and I asked himself: How could a deal that made me S.P. (Senate President) but put the President and his agenda in jeopardy, be one that helps or protects him?”

He believed that such a deal would have made him Senate President but one that would be “inutile, powerful yet powerless.”

The senator said the Senate was the “Senate of The People,” an “instrument of change and not a tool for status quo.”

“I pray for Sen. Koko and all the senators that we may fulfill peoples mandate for change so decisively placed on the shoulders or President Rodrigo Roa Duterte,” Cayetano said, referring to Senator Aquilino Pimentel III, who has been elected Senate President.

Cayetano was the only senator absent when the chamber, voting 20-3, elected its new leader. Senator Ralph Recto, who ran against Pimentel, has been named Minority Leader.

“Today, Mr. President, one of my dreams passed me by, I’m not Senate President, yet I’m excited to hear your Sona and be a part of the amazing change! This is our dream! Dream of all Filipinos! And this is more important,” Cayetano added.

The Senate and the House of Representatives will jointly convene Monday afternoon to listen to Duterte’s first state of the nation address./rga

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