Enrile claim of ‘coffee-table legislation’ irks senators

Senators on Wednesday bristled at former Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile’s description of the current Senate as doing “coffee-table legislation,” saying the 94-year-old might have been away from the Senate for too long.

“He must be being given wrong info,” Senate President Vicente Sotto III said in a text message.

Sotto dismissed Enrile’s assertion that the present crop of senators seemed more interested in enacting bills over coffee instead of vigorously debating them on the plenary floor.

“The bills in plenary are being debated and languishing in plenary before passage if controversial and smoothly passed if beneficial or noncontroversial and/or if bill of local application,” Sotto said.

He cited as examples some controversial measures that had triggered long and contentious discussions, such as those on the coco levy fund, the rice tariffication, the Bangsamoro Organic Law, the Philippine ID system, tax amnesty and universal health care.

“In fact, some are still in plenary as we speak,” he said.

‘Out too long’

Sen. Panfilo Lacson said Enrile “may have been out too long or he has forgotten how legislation works.”

The debates have opened public discussions on the alleged last-minute insertion of pork allocations in the P3.8-trillion national budget for 2019, Lacson said.

Enrile is facing trial on a P172-million plunder case in the Sandiganbayan in connection with the alleged disbursement of his pork allocations when he was senator to bogus nongovernment organizations.

The Supreme Court has allowed his release from police detention for humanitarian reasons.

He is seeking another term in the Senate in the 2019 midterm elections.

“Exactly why there is controversy involving the already outlawed ‘pork barrel’ being talked about now — it was a product of plenary interpellation on the national budget,” Lacson said.

Other measures, he said, “are being thoroughly debated on the floor before being approved on second and third reading.”

On Tuesday, Enrile attacked the current Senate leadership, saying he wished to bring back “fiery debates” on the plenary floor if elected back to the chamber.

“Out there in the Senate, where I stayed for 24 years, when I was there, nothing is passed without any debate. Unlike today, they go into a coffee table, and they discuss it among themselves, and that’s it,” he said in a statement.

“That’s not a Senate,” Enrile said. “That’s not a deliberative assembly of the people’s representatives. A democracy must be open where issues are subject to intellectual dissection.”