LP not a ‘Trojan horse’ seeking Duterte ouster—Lagman

Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman. INQUIRER.net FILE PHOTO/RYAN LEAGOGO

Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman on Tuesday flatly denied that the Liberal Party is acting like a “Trojan horse” out to plot an impeachment complaint against President Rodrigo Duterte.

In a press briefing of the minority bloc at the House of Representatives, Lagman said it is Duterte himself who is causing his inevitable impeachment due to his careless statements that strain the country’s alliances with other countries.

Duterte cursed US President Barack Obama and called him a “son of a b****” when asked about the latter’s plan to ask him at the sidelines of the Asean summit about human rights violations amid the administration’s war on drugs. But Duterte denied cursing Obama, blaming the media instead for feeding him the question.

READ: Duterte: I didn’t curse Obama

“Far from being a target of an impeachment plot from the LP, it is the President who might, so to speak, be impeaching himself for his improvident and inconvenienced statements unmindful of adverse and compromising consequences,” Lagman said.

During the Asean summit, Duterte also spoke of American atrocities of killing thousands of Moros during the Philippine-American war in the 1900s, even in the presence of Obama and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who strongly criticized the spate of human rights violations at the height of Duterte’s war on drugs.

READ: Duterte: Obama, Ban mum when I raised killings during PH-US war 

Lagman refuted the impression that that the Liberals, referred to by Duterte as the “Yellows,” are bent to impeach him even though majority of LP aligned themselves with Duterte’s super majority in Congress.

READ: In the end, LP opts to join majority bloc

The Liberals may be seen as acting like a Trojan horse, an idiom pertaining to a group of persons bent to deceive an organization from the inside. This is a reference to Greek mythology about a wooden horse given as a gift to Troy but used by the Greeks to gain entrance and attack the city.

READ: Duterte accuses LP of plotting to oust him 

Lagman said instead of calling these LP allies a Trojan horse, he saw them merely as “tame stallions.”

Lagman is a member of the Liberal Party who opted to align with the minority when he did not vote for the winning Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez.

“The House members of the Liberal Party who joined the super majority do not constitute a Trojan horse. They may be considered a tame stallion,” Lagman said. JE/rga