“Consummatum est (It is finished). Now we are in the minority.”
That was Senator Kiko Pangilinan’s statement on Wednesday in response to questions on why it took them months to leave the Senate “supermajority” bloc.
Pangilinan and fellow senators aligned with the Liberal Party were stripped of their leadership posts on Monday following debates on whether to allow confessed Davao Death Squad member retired SPO3 Arthur Lascañas to testify in a Senate hearing. Senator Bam Aquino also mentioned attending the recent Edsa rally, which Pangilinan and Senators Franklin Drilon and Risa Hontiveros also attended.
After their ouster, Senate President Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel said the Senate’s work was being “hampered by the blurring of the lines between the majority and the minority” and that “clear lines have to be drawn.”
Pangilinan, the Liberal Party president, said their group initially wanted to give the Duterte administration a chance.
“Even the media traditionally gives a new President a honeymoon period,” he said.
“Every incoming President deserves chance to prove himself and also deserves to be supported at the beginning of his term,” he said.
Pangilinan said their group “sought unity” in the hopes of working with the administration for the interest of the people.
However, he said, it has come to a point “wherein a number of events have made in untenable and unacceptable for us to stay with the supermajority in the Senate.”
“It was just a matter of time and the time did come. Hence when we are asked to leave the Supermajority, we did not resist and did so willingly and without debate,” he said.
Pangilinan denied that they were hampering the work of the Senate.
“In the 7 months that we were in the majority coalition we shepherded bills in the respective committees we chaired to the best of our abilities,” he said, adding that of the 29 bills and committee reports on 2nd reading, 20 were “defended by the LP, Senator Trillanes and Senator Hontiveros.”
Pangilinan said that although they were part of the majority coalition, they still opposed certain policies and pronouncements that they deemed “inimical to the national interest” such as the “excesses of the war on drugs and extra judicial killings, the Marcos burial, corruption in the Bureau of Immigrations, the death penalty and the lowering of the game of criminal liability of minors among others.”